Escape from Alcatraz

by J. Campbell Bruce

  In all the escapes, and escape attempts, during the Army days on Alcatraz, none led to violence, none to bloodshed, for these inmates were essentially a different breed. The men who came to The Rock as federal prisoners were classed as professional criminals. They made custodial care a far more risky business. Warden Johnston once put it: “The first thing a prisoner does is case the joint. They watch everything, every guard. They look and look for a weak point.”

  Such men were Tex Lucas and two other long-term bank bandits, Rufus Franklin and Thomas R. Limerick. They had looked, and looked, and found a weak point. It was Guard Royal C. Cline’s habit of going into his office after counting the crew into the furniture factory on the third floor of the old Model Shop Building. He did this as usual after lunch on May 23, 1938. Franklin and Limerick slipped into an adjacent saw-filing room to prepare a window that opened horizontally, while Lucas sawed a two-by-four brace. A moment later, in an unlucky departure from routine, Cline walked into the smaller workshop. They cracked his skull, fatally, with a hammer.

  Lucas came in with the slab of wood. They filled their pockets with short pieces of pipe and bolts, then braced the window open with the two-by-four. Lucas, pliers in hand, stepped out. His foot crashed through two panes, making a noise that apparently no guards heard. Lucas hesitated and Franklin gave him a nudge. He reached up with his pliers, cut the barbed wire edging the roof, then clambered up. The others followed.

  They spread out and stormed a gun tower, hurling iron missiles. Guard Harold P. Stites fired his .45 automatic, caught Limerick above the right eye. Limerick looked startled, smiled, and fell. Franklin came at the tower with a raised hammer. Stites, pistol empty, fired his rifle. The slug slammed into Franklin’s right shoulder, and he stumbled backward across the barbed wire, the hammer dropping to the ground. Guard Clifford Stewart, patrolling the far side of the roof, came on the run, saw Lucas trying to force the tower door. Stewart raised his shotgun and shouted, “Hold it!” Lucas flung himself under a catwalk.

  Lucas told the FBI: “We planned to grab the tower guard’s guns and make our way to the dock and grab the launch and escape. It was a crazy scheme and I now realize how nutty we were.”

  Lucas, already serving fifty years, drew life for the guard’s murder, and Franklin had now achieved perhaps a record: thirty years, plus two life terms. While a lifer in Alabama, he was given a temporary release upon the death of his mother and picked up a thirty-year federal rap by robbing a bank on his way to the funeral.

  So far, the two who made a clean break—if being swept to sea can be considered a successful escape—and the bloody break attempt on the rooftop breached the security of the area outside the walls. Soupy fog made the one possible, a guard’s regularity of routine set off the other. The Rock’s cellhouse was something else: all the scientific devices, the intricate locking systems, the toolproof bars, the endless counts and cell checks, the constant shakedowns, the vigilance of the guards—it was inconceivable that any man could best such a formidable array and break out. Yet, as a convict once said, what seems impossible to someone on the outside looks possible to the inmate plotting in his cell, completely surrounded by steel and concrete. Even at Alcatraz, one January morning in 1939 the impossible became the possible—an escape not just from the cellhouse but, more incredible, from solitary. It happened on a Friday the Thirteenth.…

  About 3:45 A.M. Guard Tom Pritchard, on outside patrol, groped along the road above the cliffs, his flashlight poking a ragged hole in the cottony fog. The foghorn behind him at the southeastern tip vibrated mournfully; the one at the north end answered, then distantly the horns at the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate, like croaking frogs around a lake. In one of the seconds-brief intervals of silence, Pritchard heard a distinct call, “Hey!” He stopped, turning his head like a radar antenna. A foghorn blasted the quiet. He hurried onto a blurry patch of light, the south gun tower, flashed a signal beam and shouted, “Just heard a voice. That you calling?”

  “No,” replied the towerman. “I heard voices too, coming from the cove. Something going on down there.”

  “I’ll go see,” said Pritchard.

  “Stay right there, where I can see you.”

  About then the cellhouse guard walked into D Block. All had been well at the 3 A.M. count. He glanced into the cell of Arthur (Doc) Barker, notorious kidnaper and life-termer. He peered closer. The cell was empty. He phoned the Armorer. He checked the cell next to Barker’s. Empty. Then the next, and the next, and the next. Five in a row, all vacant.

  Down in the cove below the south gun tower five gray figures worked desperately in the chill fog: Doc Barker; Dale Stamphill, also doing life for kidnaping; Rufus McCain, ninety-nine years for bank robbery, kidnaping; William Martin, twenty-five years, postal robbery; Henri Young, twenty years, bank robbery.

  McCain had horned in on the escape by a ruse. He had the job of delivering meals to convicts in solitary on a table with rollers and had intercepted a note from Young to Doc Barker regarding the plot. He then made a dagger, and in the yard on the following Saturday he feigned a fight with a prisoner. As he had foreseen, they slapped him in D Block and, better luck, in a cell next to the conspirators.

  And now they were all on the beach, working feverishly, the sound of the siren goading them on. McCain and Young were stripped to their long drawers, and the five were using their other garments to bind driftwood into a raft.

  “Shhh!” warned Doc.

  The prison launch burp-burped by. Its searchlight, like the mobile searchlights hauled to the cliff above, only whitened the mist, failing to penetrate it. Guards with submachine guns were inching down toward the shore.

  Moments later Doc again cautioned, “Shhh!”

  A Coast Guard patrol boat came along. Its powerful beam spotlighted a tableau of raft makers. The convicts scattered.

  “Halt!”

  A fusillade ripped into the flight. Stamphill stopped, slugs in both legs. Doc Barker dropped, a slug in the thigh, another in the neck that came out near the right eye. He died an hour later. Martin stood stock-still, hands high. They found the near-naked McCain, cold-blue, around a jutting cliff, on his knees begging for mercy. A few feet away stood Young in his drawers.

  Doc Barker was the youngest of the clan that Kate (Ma) Barker led out of the Ozarks. One, a small-time hoodlum, fell in a hail of police bullets. Another went to Leavenworth for life. Ma, Fred, and Doc, now joined by Alvin (Old Creepy) Karpis, blazed a career that culminated in the $200,000 abduction of Edward G. Bremer, St. Paul banker, in 1934. They took him to a hideout in Illinois and there kept him captive for twenty-one days. Later G-men traveled the route time and again; on one trip they found empty gasoline cans by the roadside, and off a can came a set of fingerprints—Doc’s. This linked the kidnaping to the Barker-Karpis gang. Doc was captured in Chicago, and ten days later G-men fought a pitched battle with Ma and Fred in Florida. She died lying behind a silenced machine gun, he beside an automatic rifle. Doc drew life. Karpis, caught soon afterward, also drew life, and on the morning Doc broke out into the fog to his death, Karpis watched him go from a cell down the row.

  At the Fort Mason pier, as Doc’s body was borne on a blood-stained stretcher from the launch to an ambulance, a guard remarked: “Well, he’s a lot better off now where he is than where he was.” Doc was buried in a plotter’s field, the brief services attended only by the prison chaplain, a prison clerk, and four paid pallbearers from an undertaking parlor.

  The multiple break from the isolation block of the escapeproof cellhouse brought Director Bennett of the Prison Bureau flying out from Washington for a personal investigation. He then explained to the press how it had happened: The quintet cut through the bottom of a bar in each cell—not with saws, which he felt could not have passed the metal detector, but possibly with a banjo string or piano wire or watch spring or any thin strip of metal, along with an abrasive such as a valve-grinding compound. They then spread the bars of a window, its sill about wai
st high, with something heavier than a crowbar, presumably a jack. They dropped eight feet to the ground, made their way to the beach and tossed the tools into the bay—again presumably, inasmuch as none were uncovered in the subsequent search.

  “Alcatraz,” Bennett said, “houses the country’s most cunning and nervy escape artists, who have plenty of time to think up ways of getting out. And when they go through our first line of defenses, we have to rebuild them. That is what we are doing. We have found nothing to lose any confidence in the prison personnel.…”

  At the inquest Associate Warden E. J. Miller, the sole witness, offered this sworn testimony: Smuggling of tools into the cellhouse was possible because the metal detector worked only about 60 percent of the time. The convicts had sawed away for a long period, undiscovered, despite periodic bar examinations by officers experienced in the ways of escape artists. No saws had been found, no trace of filings, no smear used to conceal the progress of their work on the bars. They had wrenched apart the toolproof window bars in spite of constant vigilance. No searchlight on the island was strong enough to pierce fog, but two guards patrolled the north and south halves of the island through the night, passing any given point once every half hour, shoving driftwood into the bay to prevent raft-making. The prison was well manned.

  “How many guards were on duty at the time in the cellhouse?” asked the coroner, Dr. T. B. W. Leland.

  “Two in the gun galleries, one on the floor,” Miller replied.

  “Were they asleep?”

  “Possibly,” said Miller. “They definitely were not alert.”

  Said the jury: “From the evidence at hand, we believe this escape was made possible by the failure of the system for guarding prisoners now in use at Alcatraz and we recommend a drastic improvement. Further, we recommend … that the citizens of San Francisco unite in an effort to have a more suitable location chosen for the imprisonment of the type of desperadoes at present housed at Alcatraz.”

  Said Dr. Leland, closing the case: “The citizens of San Francisco resent Alcatraz. However, as long as it is here, and not a beautiful park as I’d like to have it, we can but hope it will be open for inspection by the public.”

  This was January 24, 1939, and Coroner Leland’s hope proved forlorn. The veil remained over Alcatraz, parted briefly for secondhand inspection only when a killing required an inquest or a riot a trial. Associate Warden Miller’s candor seemed to contradict Director Bennett’s earlier comment that he had found nothing to lose any confidence in the prison personnel. Further contradiction came in the firing of a guard, an item withheld from the press.

  The jury partly got its wish: the system of containing the desperadoes in solitary was improved, not so much a drastic step as a simple modernization, for the “first line of defenses” was actually a relic of the old Army days. This was the prison’s old D Block, and a year after the flight of the quintet a new isolation quarter, featuring toolproof bars and electrically controlled locks on the dark cells, was built with a WPA appropriation.

  In a way, the secrecy of Alcatraz worked to the advantage of the prison administration, for it served as an effective cover on the real story of that break—a story that reveals both the brazenness of the convicts and an incredible custodial laxness. Unlike the new D Block, isolated behind concrete walls in the southwest corner of the cellhouse, the old block had a grate partition. The cell bars were the antiquated, flat, soft-iron. Although Bennett’s investigation indicated that no saw was used, the convicts did use a saw, a two-inch piece of a hacksaw blade. It took them, as Miller testified, a long time to cut through (they had only the one bit of blade for the five bars), but they did not rely on the protection of nighttime for this phase of their project. They chose to work days. Their chief problem was the guard in the west gun gallery, whose patrol took him periodically into D Block. However, a window in the cellhouse run of the gallery overlooked the mess hall, and the guard was stationed at the window during meals. And so the convict in possession of the blade at the moment sawed safely away through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He flushed each session’s filings down the toilet, smeared soap over the cut, then rubbed burnt matches over the soap to complete the camouflage.

  Even though the work was concealed in this way, normal checks would have detected the escape plot, considering the time required to sever a bar in each of five cells. In a check, a guard taps a bar with a rubber mallet. Tampering produces a distinctive sound.

  The window operation called for night work: they had to leave their cells. The bars were toolproof: tough alloy steel surrounding a loose rod. Cut the outer part, and that’s it: the inner core simply turns with the saw, or guitar string. The core is brittle. Nightly, like gray-clad brownies, the convicts bent their severed cell bars, crawled out, took turns hacking while one stood watch, crawled back in, straightened the bars. They placed an order on the grapevine for a bar spreader, and when they were ready (the window bar cut full circumference) it was ready, a device of remarkable simplicity: two bolts, with left- and right-handed threads, screwed into the same outsized nut. They set the bolts between two bars and turned the nut. The bolts unscrewed, the cut bar spread, the inner core cracked, and out they went.

  (Such toolproof bars are already obsolete. Convicts found they could even get by without a spreader. Cut the outer part as a woodsman fells a tree, at a slant; insert a wedge to hold the core tight; go to the other side and saw right through. Toolproof bars are now more toolproof: a half-dozen hard thin bars set in a steel tube, then steel poured in. Too tough to spread or crack, take forever to saw.)

  Plotters fear other inmates more than guards, and the fewer in the know the safer. There’s always the snitcher currying favor, and one tried it on the quintet. He snitched to a guard, “A bunch of cons keep runnin’ past my cell all night.” The guard gave him the eye, then led him to Miller, the associate warden. Convicts loose at night in D Block? The associate warden gave him the eye, then they both led him upstairs and locked him in a bug cage. Three nights later the quintet decamped.

  All these episodes, many marked by violence and bloodshed—the Roe-Cole escape and the several other escape attempts, the amazing break out of solitary, the attack on the warden, the incidence of insanity and suicides—suggested a flaw in the conceptual structure of The Rock. Warden Johnston simplified the problem in one comment to the press: “It’s not possible sometimes for men contemplating seventy-five years on Alcatraz to face such a prospect with perfect equanimity. Life is pretty monotonous here. We feed the men well and treat them well, but they just don’t like their surroundings.”

  One feature of their surroundings the men abhorred was target practice. In the evenings, after lockup, the cellhouse echoed the rattle of gunfire as guards on the yard wall outside emptied pistols, rifles, machine guns. Sometimes an inmate’s nerves cracked, and his screams of “Stop it! Goddammit, stop it!” heightened the macabre effect. In the morning, when the convicts marched out to the lineup on the way to the shops, they encountered a sight that made some queasy. Strewn about the yard, like bullet-riddled corpses, were dummies in convict garb. Even this grim object lesson failed to deter plotters, intensifying instead the desire to get away, and in time it was stopped.

  Johnston tried color psychology to relieve the dull, depressing reality of steel and concrete. He felt it would help those men who had fewer than seventy-five years of contemplation in prospect in return to society with a happier outlook. Color schemes varied: cell ceiling white, walls pale and dark greens; cellhouse walls green, gray, and white (later a startling pink with barn-red trim, still later a deep tan); pink and ivory in the mess hall; other combinations in other areas, including the shops. This brightened up the place, but not noticeably the men; they still did not seem to enjoy their surroundings.

  The starvation diet imposed on strikers and other miscreants in solitary was improved. At the time of the early strikes against the severe rules prison officials denied that the warden had issued a no-work, no-ea
t edict and indicated the men were fed as usual. Much later, the warden offered his own views on dungeons and diets, and the punitive merit of hunger: “People get the wrong idea when you talk of dungeons. We have the dungeons and we sometimes use them. But it is not always necessary to use dungeons to punish a prisoner. You’d be surprised how much enforced absence from a meal or two will do to change the attitude of a recalcitrant prisoner.”1

  The new diet in solitary called for a minimum of 2,100 calories a day (3,600 in the mess hall), but it did not specify in what form. An ex-guard recalls: “We called it the monotony diet: bread and water in the morning, and in the evening plain boiled spaghetti, no seasoning or sauce of any kind. To make their breakfast more palatable, we’d slap a little mustard on the bread.”

  Still trouble brewed on the island, periodically erupted. Johnston attributed it to the inability of some long-termers to embrace a stoic attitude, insisting that the food and treatment were all any incarcerated man might desire. He decried the brutality of a solitary confinement, said it was seldom inflicted. Only when a prisoner became obstreperous was he sent down to the dungeon to cool off. He told a reporter that strong-arm methods were not actually needed on Alcatraz because the “everyday safeguards instill a feeling of helplessness.” Even if the safeguards failed, the regular guards never resorted to bullying or beating to pacify an unruly convict: “Like noncommissioned officers in the Army, they use only moral suasion.”

  1 Warden Johnston’s views on dungeons and diets were told to Alfred P. Reck, North American Newspaper Alliance writer and later city editor of the Oakland Tribune.