by Paul Simpson
Their protests were to no avail. Even attempts to prove how easy it was to escape were ignored – including the demonstration by Doris McLeod and Gloria Scigliano that it was perfectly possible to swim from the Rock to the shore safely. Security in the prison was tightened up considerably, with the new inmates confined to a much smaller part of the island than had been used by the military prisoners. Doors were placed across tunnels, new metal window guards were installed, and tool-proof gratings added around ventilation shafts. The Justice Department wanted Alcatraz to be escape-proof. Guards tried to saw through the bars, but could only make an impression on the softer outer metal – the inner core defeated them.
On 19 June 1934, the US Army officially departed from the Rock, leaving thirty-four prisoners behind; on 11 August, the first batch of new civilian prisoners arrived on Alcatraz. Of those fourteen, half had escaped from or been involved in attempts to escape from previous jails; nearly all were described by the Warden as “desperate” and quite a few, it was noted, would be prepared to kill in order to get away. Not one of them is listed in the successful escapes from Alcatraz that followed over the next thirty or so years. According to the Bureau of Prisons report on the first year of operations, “The establishment of this institution not only provided a secure place for the detention of the more difficult type of criminal but has had a good effect upon discipline in our other penitentiaries also. No serious disturbance of any kind has been reported during the year.”
It didn’t really surprise Alcatraz’s warden to learn that there were rumours of escape plans from the Rock right from the start. As he explained to his superiors, prisoners automatically checked their surroundings for weak spots. They came up with plans that would work if only they had a gun, or access to a speedboat or airplane. He refused to allow such rumours to give him the jitters.
The first acknowledged escape attempt from the Federal Penitentiary was carried out by Joseph “Joe” Bowers, who was one of the first prisoners transferred to Alcatraz, aged roughly thirty-seven, in September 1934. His crime: a post office robbery that netted the grand total of sixteen dollars and thirty-eight cents. His sentence: twenty-five years’ imprisonment.
Bowers claimed that he had been raised in a travelling circus, and had visited multiple countries acting as an interpreter as he spoke six languages. He had been arrested for transporting stolen vehicles across state lines in 1928, and driving while drunk two years later, before graduating to robbery in 1932. While imprisoned in the Washington state McNeil Island federal penitentiary, he was described as “unpredictable and at high risk resulting from being emotionally unstable”. His period at high-security prison Leavenworth was marked by violations of institution rules, a practice he continued when he was transferred to Alcatraz.
Within six months of arriving on the Rock, Joe Bowers tried to commit suicide, cutting his throat by breaking his spectacles and using a piece of glass to inflict a three-inch-long wound. The Alcatraz authorities didn’t take the attempt on 7 March 1935 seriously: the prison psychiatrist Edward W. Twitchell observed Bowers and reported to his superiors that “the recent attempts at suicide have been theatrically planned and have resulted in very little damage to him . . . Bower, while an abnormal individual, is not truly insane in my opinion and is pretending a mental disturbance for some purpose.”
A year passed, during which time Bowers failed to cope well with the tough regime at Alcatraz. Prisoners were only allowed to communicate with each other on rare occasions, and then usually only to the extent required (such as in the mess). For a man who claimed that he had made his living by speaking to others, it was a torment. In March 1936, he was assigned to the incinerator detail, one of the worst assignments on the Rock, sorting out metals and burning the prison waste. On 26 April 1936 Joe Bowers came to a premature end of his sentence when he was shot down by Junior Custodial Officer E. F. Chandler.
Some inmates thought that Bowers was trying to retrieve a piece of rubbish that had become lodged in the fence. Others said that he was trying to feed a seagull that he had spotted. There is a school of thought that he simply cracked and committed suicide. Whatever his motive, it is certain that at around 11 a.m. that morning, Bowers climbed the wire fence, and refused to listen to warnings from guard Chandler to get down. In his official report the next day, Chandler wrote:
He ignored my warning and continued to go over. I fired two shots low and waited a few seconds to see the results. He starded (sic) down the far side of the fence and I fired one more shot, aiming at his legs. Bowers was hanging on the fence with his hands but his feet were pointing down toward the cement ledge. After my third shot I called the Armory and reported the matter. When I returned from ’phoning the body dropped into the bay.
His report was corroborated by another junior guard, Neil S. Morrison, who said that he heard two shots and saw Bowers “bare-footed, with his pants rolled up, climbing up the fence with his back and part of his right side towards me. I ran along the fence toward the incinerator in hopes I could get there in time to stop him if he got stuck on his way over. There was one more shot before I got to the rock crusher . . . When I reached there, I saw his body on the rocks through the incinerator grating.”
Chandler was certain that Bowers’ actions were deliberate. “He knew what he was doing and I couldn’t go get him without wings,” he told a Coroner’s jury panel. Even if he didn’t mean to escape, though, Bowers’ last moments after being shot in the lungs, were spent sixty feet below the walls of Alcatraz – on the free side.
The first confirmed escape from the island came in December 1937, although its perpetrators, Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe, were never heard from again. Cole was serving a fifty-year term for kidnapping, Roe a ninety-nine-year sentence for armed robbery. The two men answered their names for the 1 p.m. count on 16 December, but had vanished by the next count half an hour later. They were working in the industrial buildings on the north-west side of the island, which posed some security problems for the authorities, since its waterside aspect couldn’t be seen by the guards in the watchtowers. The warden had made the Justice Department aware of this problem, but funds hadn’t been available to rectify the situation. Somehow Cole and Roe had broken two panes of glass on that side of the mat shop, then jimmied a lock on the wire fence surrounding the building.
There were few places for them to hide, particularly as it was high tide and the caves under the north-west end were flooded, so it was assumed that they must have made a swim for it – choosing a very picturesque way to commit suicide, according to Director of Prisons James V. Bennett. Alcatraz Warden James A. Johnston firmly believed that they tried swimming. As he explained to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Serving terms tantamount to life imprisonment, it is my belief they decided to take a desperate chance and that they had no outside aid. I believed they drowned and that their bodies were swept toward the Golden Gate by the strong ebb tide.” Despite this, a wave of hysteria flooded San Francisco with eventual sightings of the felons near Petaluma, in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and even South America. The San Francisco police warned the citizens that the two men might well try to carry out further robberies.
However, Johnston’s theory is the most likely, and he was backed up by a report from assistant city engineer Floyd C. Whaley, who knew the local tides and eddies. Whaley was sure that it was impossible for the two men to reach the mainland since the tides had been exceptionally high that day. There was a very heavy fog, and it was just possible that a vessel might have been able to come closer to the shore than the usual 200-yard cordon, and pick the men up, but it seems pretty certain that, like Bowers, Cole and Roe achieved their liberty, but paid the ultimate price.
As a result of their breakout, the Public Works administration agreed to finance a new watchtower which would have eyes on the rear of the industries building, which itself was renewed as part of a modernization of the prison.
Five months after Cole and Roe disappeared from the Rock, three prisoners trie
d their own breakout. One of them, James C. Lucas, already had a claim to fame, after stabbing Chicago gang boss Al Capone in the shower room. He and Rufus Franklin were both serving thirty-year sentences; their accomplice Thomas R. Limerick, a bank robber and kidnapper, was in for life.
The three men were all engaged in the woodworking shop in the industrial building and on the afternoon of 23 May 1938, they decided that they had had enough of the brutal regime in force at Alcatraz. Carrying with them a hammer, some lead weights and pieces of iron, they resolved to escape over the roof. What they had in mind after that never became clear, since they never got as far as the edge of the island. “They probably figured they could seize the prison boat and make their getaway from the island,” Warden Johnston suggested to the San Francisco Chronicle, but this was never confirmed by any of the men.
In their way on the top floor stood the unarmed senior custodial officer Royal C. Cline, who was quickly despatched by a blow to the head with a hammer, leaving him lying on the ground fatally injured. The three men climbed through a window out onto the roof, but before they could go any further, they were spotted. Franklin had inched around the wall of a raised portion of the roof, but the guard apparently sensed something was wrong, and turning, shot him in the shoulder. Lucas and Limerick tried to throw the pieces of iron at the guard to put him off, but only one piece went through the shatterproof glass in the guard tower, slightly injuring the guard in one leg. Limerick was hit in the head, and Lucas managed to hide behind a wall, but soon realized the futility of his actions and surrendered. Both guard Cline and prisoner Limerick died within twenty-four hours.
Lucas and Franklin were tried for first-degree murder, and received life sentences; their defence that they had been beaten, kicked and pushed around by the prison officers was ignored.
The administration paid the price for not upgrading the bars across the whole prison in January 1939 when a group of five prisoners made their bid for freedom. They had all been involved with a “strike” action in September 1937, and as a result they had been held in the isolation cells. Unfortunately these still had the original soft iron bars from the prison’s time under the control of the US military, which were considerably easier to get through than their counterparts in the main prison.
The five men included Arthur “Doc” Barker, a member of the Ma Barker crime family. He had been arrested by FBI Special Agent Melvin Purvis in January 1935 on charges of kidnapping, and sentenced to life imprisonment. After his transfer to Alcatraz, he was assigned to the mat shop, where he quickly took control of the other inmates, and was believed by the authorities to be instrumental in organizing a general strike over prison conditions. According to a fellow prisoner, Alvin Karpis, though, Barker was “more interested in escape than confrontation. We join the strike to avoid suspicion; if we refuse to strike the officials will ask themselves why and it will make our escape plans more difficult.” No matter the extent of his involvement, Barker was sent to the isolation cells in the old military dungeons and realized that here was a perfect place from which to escape.
Barker became embroiled in various other potential escape plans before putting his own into operation: Al Karpis suggested breaking out of the isolation cells, overpowering the guards, stealing their uniforms, heading over to the family compound, where the prison guards’ and officers’ wives and children lived, and taking the warden and his wife hostage. They would then commandeer a launch that would come to pick up the warden’s wife, who they would claim was ill. Barker, not too surprisingly, felt that this was too complex.
Instead, Barker arranged for a crew of five – himself, murderer and kidnapper Dale Stamphill, and robbers Rufus Roy McCain, Henry Young and William Martin – to get themselves placed in isolation for infringing the rules. There they started using hacksaw blades which had been smuggled into the prison to cut through the bars of the cell, evading the metal detectors by keeping the blades near their feet, where the crude metal detectors weren’t effective.
Although the cell bars were easy enough to get through, the window bars were of the stronger quality found elsewhere on the Rock. To get through these the men devised a small-pressure jack, which was strong enough to bend the bars back and forth and eventually break the strong core. The breaks were filled with putty and painted with aluminium paint, matching the colour of the bars.
On Friday 13 January 1939, the Barker gang were ready to make their move. They let themselves out of their cells, and spread open the bars of the windows, squeezing through. The heavy morning fog prevented the guards from spotting them as they made their way to the base of a cliff and prepared to swim across the bay. They lashed together pieces of driftwood and lumber and started out, only for McCain to point out that he couldn’t swim!
By this time, the alert had been sounded, after the floor officer had spotted their departure on an informal roll call around 3.45 a.m. Patrol boats were launched by the coastguard and the prison guards, and spotlights used to illuminate the coastline. Although the accounts of what happened next are contradictory, it’s clear that Doc Barker was hit in the leg and the head, and Stamphill was also injured. Young and McCain were arrested after surrendering immediately the light was turned on them, although McCain had apparently suggested that they run towards the prison officers’ houses, because they wouldn’t be shot there. Martin was at large for the longest of the fugitives, but after he fell down the cliff at the south end of the island, he surrendered to prison officers. According to Warden Johnston’s book about his time on the island, Barker said he had been “a fool to try it” and succumbed to his wounds twelve hours after the escape attempt. A guard commented, “Well, he’s a lot better off now where he is than where he was.”
As a result of his death, a Coroner’s jury was empanelled, and decided that:
. . . the said Arthur R. Barker met his death attempting to escape from Alcatraz Prison by gunshot wounds inflicted by guards unknown.
From the evidence at hand, we the jury, believe that 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 shore and waters immediately surrounding the prison; and that the citizens of San Francisco unite in an effort to have a more suitable location chosen for imprisonment of the type of desperadoes at present housed at Alcatraz.
A year later, funds were apportioned so that the isolation block could be modernized. No one else was going to leave Alcatraz from there.
The industrial building was the scene of another attempted escape a couple of years later, shortly after Henry Young was placed on trial for murdering Rufus McCain, whose inability to swim he probably blamed for the failure of the 1939 escape and the death of Doc Barker, as well as his unwillingness to use the wives of guards as shields during the break. Four felons, brothers-in-law Joseph Paul Cretzer and Arnold T. Kyle, Floyd H. Barkdoll and Sam R. Shockley took four prison guards, including future Alcatraz Warder Paul J. Madigan, in the mat shop hostage and then tried to pull apart the steel bars over the windows.
Warden Johnston described events to the San Francisco Examiner for their 22 May 1941 edition:
Right after lunch the four men lured Stoops into one of the rooms of the mat shop on the pretence that a machine was out of order. Then they fell upon him, bound him hand and foot with heavy bundle twine, and gagged him.
Then they herded other convicts into a separate room and went to work on the window, using a piece of pipe to pry off the reinforced inside casement.
They had worked at it about half an hour when Manning, who wasn’t expected, entered the shop on a routine inspection tour. They had a lookout posted. When Manning entered one grabbed him on each side and one from behind, and they hustled him into the room with Stoops, binding him but not gagging them [sic].
Then they went back to the window. By this time they had pried off part
of the casement. They dragged over a small motor-driven emery stone and began grinding away at one of the toolproof bars.
One of the convicts remained posted at the door as a guard, and when Officer Johnston entered he was hustled in with the other officers. So far as I can gather they at no time used any weapons on the officers, just overpowering them by surprise and strength of numbers. Barkdoll is a big, husky man and took the lead.
Finally Captain Madigan entered the shop. They overpowered him too. But Captain Manning pointed out to them that it was time for the officers to ring in to the administration building, and that an alarm would be sounded if the officers failed to ring in. They were about ready to give up anyway. They had to cut through at least probably three of the bars before they could drop down to the outside and they hadn’t even cut through one.
So they freed Madigan. He phoned the administration building, and by the time we got there he was leading them away.
This wasn’t the last time that at least two of them were going to try to get away: Cretzer and Shockley were key figures in what would have been the most daring attempt, which culminated in the Battle of Alcatraz in 1946.
Before then came three other thwarted prison breaks. Twenty-five-year-old bank robber John R. Bayless was caught on the point of swimming away from the island by prison guards, after he had absconded from a garbage detail, taking advantage of a thick fog that had settled over the island. Some reports suggest that he surrendered when he realized how cold the water in San Francisco bay was on that September afternoon in 1941, others that he was pulled from the water before hypothermia set in. Either way, it didn’t prevent him from wanting to gain his freedom: when he appeared in court the following year, during a hearing to try to gain a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds he hadn’t been represented by legal counsel when he was convicted, he took advantage of what he thought was lax security. He leaped over a railing and headed for the rear door of the court but was grabbed by a deputy marshal.
