by David Ward
Let’s do this bit of time with the best grace and cheerfully . . . if you really love me as you say, you should be able to keep smiling with me and keep your mind free to a degree of prison non-essentials, and small annoyances, and instead look forward to at some future date, creating with me, the life together that I desire. I do love you, you know mister. . . . Wish I could see you, I do, I do. . . . Now settle down and be happy heart of my heart. Devotedly, your Katrinka
Despite her recriminations and threats of divorce in early September, Kathryn’s appeal succeeded at encouraging George to resume their correspondence, although there were periodic misunderstandings when letters were returned to the sender by new or substitute mail censors, who were confused by the changing rules governing their communication. Since letters to and from Alcatraz inmates were censored and retyped, inmates and their correspondents could only guess at what had been removed from sentences that did not end logically or make sense. Both Kellys were well aware that they were also writing for the Bureau of Prisons, FBI officials, and especially the U.S. Parole Board.
During a spring 1940 visit to Alcatraz, Director James Bennett stopped on his walk through the prison to chat with Kelly. He commented that he had had occasion to talk with Charles Urschel (Kelly’s kidnap victim) and that Urschel did not seem “hostile” toward Kelly. Bennett then asked Kelly if he had ever thought about writing to Urschel. In this suggestion was implied an extraordinary exception to the prohibition on prisoners corresponding with anyone in the free world other than family members—especially kidnap victims.
Several months later, acting on this suggestion, Kelly sent through Bennett’s office a letter to Urschel. From that point on, the Bureau of Prisons allowed Kelly (and his rap partner, Bates) to write to and receive letters from their kidnap victim, Charles Urschel, and E. E. Kirkpatrick, the man who had conveyed the ransom money from the victim’s family to them. This extraordinary deviation from a rule that was vigorously applied to other prisoners produced letters that were models of civility by all parties.
Kelly’s first letter to Urschel is one of the most sophisticated and artfully expressed descriptions of the pains of imprisonment written by any inmate at any prison. It began with the explanation that he was writing at Bennett’s suggestion. He asked Urschel to determine for him the truth of reports that oil had been struck in the vicinity of the Shannon property in Paradise, Texas, where Kelly still held title to a farm. Kelly hoped that Urschel was not feeling “too vindictive” about the threats made against him and explained that he had gotten caught up in “the Department of Justice’s love of the dramatic and the public’s desire for a good free show.” The remarkable soliloquy that followed was Kelly’s answer to a question he thought might be in Urschel’s mind:
I feel that at times you wonder how I am standing up under my penal servitude, and what is my attitude of mind? It is natural that you should be infinitely curious. Incidentally, let me say that you’ve missed something in not having had the experience for yourself. No letter, no amount of talk, and no literary description in second-rate books—and books on crime cannot but be second rate—could ever give you the faintest idea of reality.
No one can know what it’s like to suffer from the sort of intellectual atrophy, the pernicious mental scurvy, that comes of long privation of all the things that make life real; because even the analogy of thirst can’t possibly give you an inkling of what it’s like to be tortured by the absence of everything that makes life worth living. . . .
Maybe you have asked yourself, “how can a man of even ordinary intelligence put up with this kind of life, day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year?” To put it more mildly still, what is this life of mine like, you might wonder, and whence do I draw sufficient courage to endure it. To begin with, these five words seem written in fire on the walls of my cell: “Nothing can be worth this—the kind of life I am leading.”
What helps me to carry on? Perhaps the thought that I might be worse off. You may laugh, but it’s probably true. I might be in a worse place where there is brutality or even bestiality. I might go blind. I might even be dead.
I feel splendid and am in perfect physical trim. My one obsession is the climate of the Island. I am constantly bothered with colds. My cell, made of steel and concrete, is always a trifle chilly; but I’ve even come to believe that man is so made that the presence of a small superficial irritation, provided the sensation is acute without being symptomatic of any serious trouble, is a definite aid to his mental equilibrium and serves to keep occupied the restless margin of his consciousness. He regards it too, as a sort of ring of Polycrates, for I suspect that there is in all of us, always, an obscure sense of fate, inherited from numberless ancestral misfortunes, which whispers: “We are not sent into this world to live too happily. Where there’s nothing to worry us, it’s not natural, it’s a bad sign.” A little misfortune gives us the assurance that we are paying our “residence tax” so far as this world is concerned—not much to be sure, but enough to ensure us against the jealousy and thunderbolts of Heaven.
I have found the secret of how to “do” easy time. I just let myself drift along; the tide of time picks me up and carries me with it. It will leave me high and dry precisely where it chooses and when it chooses; consequently, I have nothing to worry about.
But I must be fair. Being in prison has brought me one positive advantage. It could hardly do less. It’s name is comradeship—a rough kindness of man to man; unselfishness, an absence, or a diminution, of the tendency to look ahead, at least very far ahead; a carelessness, though it is bred of despair; a clinging to life and the possible happiness it may offer at some future date.
A person in prison can’t keep from being haunted by a vision of life as it used to be, when it was real and lovely. At such times I pay, with a sense of delicious, overwhelming melancholy, my tribute to life as it once was. I don’t really believe it can ever be like that again.21
No direct response to this letter was received from Charles Urschel; Urschel did respond in a letter to Albert Bates that no oil had been discovered near Kelly’s farm. Bates received the reply because of the relentless search for his part of the ransom that had never been recovered.
In late February 1941 Kelly began an effort to obtain a transfer. He wrote to Warden Johnston arguing that as a long-termer he wanted to be sent to a prison where there would be more opportunities for recreation, diversion, and earning money:
While not meaning to be flippant, I would say 7 years in this climate could not be considered a bagatelle judged by either the Gregorian or by the Julian calendar.
He complained of the high winds, lack of sunshine and cramped space in the yard, and expressed his desire to be able earn enough to provide a “few trifles,” such as newspapers, makeup, and cigarettes, for his wife, to ease her time. He ended the letter: “I am writing to you before [asking for an interview] so that the audacity of my asking for a transfer will not come as too much of a shock.”
In response, Johnston advised Kelly that he needed a longer period with “an excellent record.” In fall 1944, before a transfer could be considered, Kathryn and George wrote to the attorney general requesting that George be considered for a transfer since it was their understanding that such a decision was to be made in his office, not by the Bureau of Prisons. Kelly noted that he was one of only eight or ten men still left on the Rock who had come on the first prison trains and referred to himself as “one of the original homesteaders of Alcatraz.” The climate on the island he described as “murderous,” and the cause of his continuing sinus trouble. He wanted to be in a prison where he could read a newspaper, listen to the radio, and receive visits from his sons. Kathryn asked that George be transferred to Leavenworth because she was concerned about both his mental and physical health. The following April Kelly wrote to Bennett:
I realize all the men who originally opened up Alcatraz were sort of guinea-pigs. No doubt some of us were kept her
e to justify the expenditure. After 11 years the place doesn’t need justifying—it is here to stay; consequently I feel the Department could spare me from the Rock quite easily.
He pleaded that it was embarrassing for his sons to receive letters from him with “a big ALCATRAZ” on the envelope, and admitted, “I realize I should have thought of this 12 years ago when I put Mr. Urschel in the basement but that is neither here nor there.”
In 1948, after James Johnston’s departure, Kelly again applied for a transfer, hoping that the new warden would have a different view of the matter; Edwin Swope did not.
Please be advised that, in my opinion, he has earned the privilege of consideration for transfer by his general conduct, but on the other hand, it is my personal opinion that it would be ill-advised to transfer him at the present time taking into consideration all of the mitigating circumstances which brought about his commitment to this institution . . . we must take into consideration the fact that he not only was convicted of a serious crime, but that through his braggadocio attitude there were some very pronounced threats made with reference to taking the lives of the trial judge, as well as others, which in my opinion would revive the publicity that this subject craves if he were transferred at this time.22
Throughout the 1940s, Kelly kept up his correspondence with Kathryn, the connection—despite its difficulties—being essential to his emotional well-being. In 1949, however, their correspondence came to an abrupt halt when Kelly’s son commented during a visit to the island that Kathryn was writing to a man in Texas. This news plunged Kelly into a deep depression, and he stopped writing to her. The change in Kelly’s demeanor after this small event was so significant that Warden Swope felt called upon to report Kelly’s morose condition to Bureau headquarters. Director Bennett, in response, ordered that an inquiry be made of the warden at the women’s prison at Alderson, West Virginia. Bennett was informed that Kathryn’s only correspondence to “a man in Texas” was to her stepfather, R. G. Shannon, who had been paroled. This information was relayed back to Warden Swope with the suggestion that it be “subtly communicated” to Kelly to ease his fear that Kathryn cared for another man.
In October 1950 Kelly again pleaded for a transfer in a letter to James Bennett: “I am the only man left who originally opened this place in 1934 . . . you transferred Bailey years ago.” Not only did Kelly wish to be in a prison with normal privileges, he had become disgusted with the change in the character of the population at Alcatraz as the bank robbers and ransom kidnappers of the gangster era left the island. As he looked around the yard, he commented to his friend William Radkay, “Just look at this joint and tell me how many thieves [real professional criminals] you got in here . . . no more than twenty-five out of more than two hundred inmates!”23
Director Bennett noted that Kelly’s request for transfer posed a problem: since his prison conduct was completely law abiding, the transfer denials raised a question as to whether there really was a reward for good conduct at Alcatraz. Bennett also conceded in an internal Bureau memo that Kelly was being made to “suffer because of his reputation and build up to a far greater extent than any others who had ever been to Alcatraz.”24 When Bennett finally approved a transfer in fall 1950, it was rescinded after Warden Swope again objected on the grounds of Kelly’s “big shot complex.”
An example of how this “complex” expressed itself occurred in September 1949. Kelly had complained that there were ants in his cell and asked to use a spray gun that was stored in an empty cell in A block. Accompanied by a guard, Kelly passed by the area where inmates sat on stools looking through windows at their visitors seated on the other side of a partition. As Kelly and his escort walked by, an inmate who was having a visit turned around and spoke to him. Kelly replied, waved, and remarked that the inmate had a “good looking wife.” After retrieving the spray gun and walking back past the visiting area again, the same inmate called for Kelly to come over. Before the officer could stop him, Kelly covered the short distance to the visiting area and said “hello” to the visitor. When the guard came over to stop the communication, Kelly said he did not think there was anything wrong with trying to speak to the inmate’s wife; the guard informed him that there was. Kelly’s “big shot complex,” said one of his supervisors, “is so ingrained in him that we just take it as a matter of course.”25 But the Alcatraz wardens and Bureau headquarters were also aware of the symbolic value to the continued operation of the prison in housing one of the country’s best-known “public enemies.”
In May 1951 James Bennett finally decided that after eighteen years, Kelly should be transferred to Leavenworth. The Bureau was correct in anticipating that moving the island’s most famous occupant would not go unnoticed. Before he arrived at Leavenworth, word of Kelly’s transfer was leaked to the press, prompting speculation that once free of Alcatraz, he would be considered for parole. The county attorney from Fannin County, Texas, immediately wrote to the U.S. Parole Board urging that Kelly not be released “to further prey on the innocent citizens of this country. Never again do we want to see the terrible destruction that was wreaked on this nation by the gangsters of Kelly’s ilk.” The county attorney reminded the board that Kelly had robbed the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Ladonia, Texas, and during the course of the robbery, “he machine gunned the town, leaving bullet holes which have not been erased.”26
The FBI agent who supervised the Urschel investigation, and who had subsequently left the Bureau to go to work for the victim, Charles Urschel, wrote to the parole board requesting that he be allowed to appear if Kelly was considered for parole. The sheriff of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, filed two detainers against Kelly for a robbery on the night of July 22, 1933, charges that related to taking wallets from Charles Urschel and Walter R. Jarrett after Kelly and Bates abducted them. Kelly protested that this was a phony charge, only filed as a threat to get him to plead guilty to federal charges, since a charge of robbery in the state of Oklahoma carried a possible death sentence. Kelly expressed his anger at the vindictiveness of Urschel, who he believed was behind this action and promptly petitioned the Oklahoma County Superior Court to have the detainers removed on the grounds that the time that had elapsed violated state statutes that assured a speedy trial on criminal charges; he also pointed out that the detainer acted as a barrier to his consideration for parole, and posed “a distressing mental health problem to the petitioner.”
On June 1, 1951, Kelly and several other prisoners were taken from a prison railroad car at the Union Station in Kansas City and brought to Leavenworth. Two years later the Bureau of Prisons authorized Kelly’s release to Oklahoma authorities for trial on the 1933 charges. Meanwhile, letters continued to come in to the Bureau asking if he was being considered for parole. Although eligible to file for parole consideration in 1948, Kelly had never applied because he understood the futility of such a request. (His wife and mother-in-law had failed in their effort to obtain paroles.)
What Kelly may have suspected was that the FBI had a standing order with the Bureau of Prisons stating that J. Edgar Hoover wished to be notified if Kelly applied for parole. The FBI’s powerful opposition to any consideration of parole was evident in memoranda circulated within, and sent out from, Bureau headquarters. One note from Hoover to the attorney general asserted that both Kellys were seeking parole when in fact George had not filed for consideration; both Kellys were also blamed for being uncooperative in the recovery of Bates’s share of the ransom money. Hoover inaccurately reported that Kelly had previously applied for a parole and had been turned down by the parole board; he made reference to recent negative press comments about the parole board’s decisions to release several associates of Al Capone. The letter concluded with a statement of Hoover’s strong personal opposition to parole consideration for the Kellys, referring to their crime “as one of the most heinous against society.”27
The Alcatraz Catholic chaplain, Father Joseph Clark, who was said to be championing the release of George Kelly an
d John Paul Chase, met with the FBI director in Washington, D.C. Hoover jotted a note on a memorandum summarizing the substance of the meeting: “Watch closely and endeavor to thwart efforts of this priest who should be attending to his own business instead of trying to turn loose on society such mad dogs.”28
Back at Leavenworth, Kelly encountered the downside of a transfer from a small prison comprised of only single cells to a big penitentiary with large cells housing multiple occupants. He complained to the staff that after eighteen years living by himself he would “flip his cookie” if he was forced to live in a six-man cell. The Leavenworth staff understood the problems for long-term Alcatraz inmates who had to adjust to life in a standard penitentiary and share a six-man cell. Two months after his arrival, Kelly was transferred to a single cell. Six months later he asked to be moved to a cell being vacated by another inmate because it had a view of the countryside outside the prison, noting, “The cells I have had for the past 18 years have had nothing but a blank wall opposite.” This request was denied on the ground that despite eighteen years on the Rock he could not be passed ahead of the others on the long list of Leavenworth inmates who had signed up for the cells with a view.
Kelly received no visits at Leavenworth, but he continued to correspond with one of his sons, his daughter-in-law, the Shannons, and Kathryn. His job as a clerk in the industries program allowed him to increase the amount of money for commissary items (sometimes up to $100 every two months) that he had been sending to Kathryn from the date he began earning small wages at Alcatraz. George and Kathryn were allowed to exchange photos of each other every few years, and George was allowed to write longer letters to her three or four times a month.
From Leavenworth, with more than a thousand inmates and the full range of prison activities as well as rumor and gossip, there was much more news to write about. In addition there was access to radio broadcasts and uncensored newspapers. Even for a correspondent as literate, insightful, and devoted as George Kelly was, writing from Alcatraz had posed challenges; inmates were permitted no news from the outside world and were constrained in their ability to mention anything about persons or events in the prison. Given these limitations and the slow turnover in the inmate population, there was very little to write about.
