Nine years later he was on the garbage detail at Alcatraz with Aaron Burgett, twenty-eight, a rangy gunman doing twenty-six years for the $15.26 robbery of the post office at Banner, Missouri, in May 1952. Burgett was the tenth child of a Missouri cotton picker and had acquired the nickname of Wig as a boy because of long blonde curls. His father said after his capture: “I was father and mother both to him, after his ma died when he was three. He was a mighty good boy, never drank none, went to church, never got in fights, and made an honest livin’ pickin’ cotton till he got mixed up with a no-account woman.” He went off with her to St. Louis and joined a gang, was picked up one night after the postal robbery when a state trooper stopped his car and found eight loaded guns in it. The trooper said Burgett impressed him as “a sadist who doesn’t seem to have any reason for wanting to live.”
Burgett’s blonde hair had darkened to brown, and was crewcut, by the time he had reached Alcatraz and was picking up garbage in the residential area that September afternoon with Johnson. A heavy fog, rare in late September, had rolled in over The Rock; so thick, in fact, that Guard Harold Miller was startled to see a knife inches from his face and to hear Burgett saying, “Be good and you’ll be all right.” Miller was good. They roped him like a steer, tied a strip of cloth tight over his mouth, another strip over his eyes, then lugged him behind the houses and dumped him in a clump of bushes. They gathered up escape gear they had stashed away among other shrubs and made for the shore.
A half hour later the lieutenant of the guards, wondering what had become of Miller and the garbage detail, launched a search. They found him thrashing around in the bushes. The Armorer kicked on the siren. A Coast Guard patrol boat’s searchlight, boring through the fog, discovered Johnson standing waist-deep in the bay, his teeth chattering like castanets. “We made a good try,” he said, “but it just didn’t work.”
For five days, while the convicts were locked up, listening on their headsets to the World Series, searchers poked in the caves at the foot of the windward cliffs. And then Warden Madigan told the newspapers: “I’m satisfied Burgett isn’t on the island. I think he’s drowned. It’s a tough swim, even for an expert.”
On the thirteenth day after the escape, a guard came on duty at 8 A.M. in the south gun tower. He swung his binoculars around the bay in a routine scanning. He spotted a body, or a log, floating a hundred yards off the southeast tip of the island. It was Burgett. Either the tides had carried him out the Golden Gate and brought him back, or he had snagged on a rock when he went down. That was the normal time for a body to come up.
“If a body doesn’t surface in the first few hours, then it takes ten days to two weeks,” explained Dr. Henry W. Turkel, coroner of San Francisco. “It depends on various factors: what the individual has ingested, the bacteria in his stomach, and whether the crabs get to him. It takes gas to float to the top, and if the body is caught on rocks it will take longer, upwards of two weeks, for the bacteria to produce enough gas to set the body free and let it rise. But if the crabs puncture the stomach and release the gas, the body will never come up. That’s why, in burials at sea, they always make an incision.”
Burgett’s body was considerably decomposed, but there was enough left of a thumb for an identifying print, and his convict number, 991, was stenciled on the belt. His body was still weighted with equipment he had painstakingly gathered, hidden away, then donned or strapped on for the swim to San Francisco. In a pocket was the thin, sharp knife he had made himself, the shiv he had stuck in Guard Miller’s face. Apparently he had lost only his cap in the struggle with the tide rips. He was warmly clothed to endure the cold water, and that ironically may have been his undoing: the weighty garb, once waterlogged, probably made him sink.
He was wearing heavy shoes and an extra pair of socks, and he had pulled an extra pair of long cotton drawers over his trousers and fastened them with a safety pin. He had tied the pants legs snug around his ankles with black plastic tape to make them watertight. He had improvised a “water wing” out of the sleeve of a black plastic raincoat, which he tied to his belt. His ditty bag—a small bag convicts use to hold dominoes—was also attached to his belt, probably as a repair kit. Instead of dominoes, it held an odd collection: a coil of tape such as that binding his pants legs; a circle of string, like a key ring, holding safety pins and short pieces of wire; two small rocks. And still taped securely to the soles of his shoes were what was left of a pair of wooden fins: the part projecting beyond the toes had broken off.
Aaron Burgett was the eighteenth who had tried to get off The Rock. Five, stopped by slugs, made it to the morgue. Roe and Cole vanished. Most of the others, like Johnson, were waiting in the water or on the shore for capture—or rescue. A few, like Hamilton, came crawling back.
Johnson was hauled before the prison’s own disciplinary court, convicted, and lodged in solitary.
This luckless try, long after the Battle of Alcatraz, occurred just a year and three months before Frank Morris came to The Rock. Little about Morris’s appearance, that January morning when he bombarded the Warden Johnston, would have warned of his own purpose, and his ability to carry it out. After he did accomplish it, Associate Director Fred T. Wilkinson of the Federal Prison Bureau, who was warden at Atlanta when Morris was there and knew him well, gave a thumbnail character sketch to the Associated Press: “Morris quiet and very intelligent. He’s not given to rash violence. Above all, he’s a planner. The whole operation seems typical of him.”
Primarily a burglar all his criminal life, Morris had, as his last offense, participated in the burglary of a bank in Louisiana. Hardly a gangster show, but a look at his record explains why he was sent to this penal stronghold: a potential escape problem. His past, from childhood, was a long blotter of breakouts. He was even an escapee the night he helped burglarize the Louisiana bank.…
The spring harvest was in full swing at the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, about forty-five miles northwest of Baton Rouge, on a remote 18,000-acre tract in a blend of the Mississippi, partly cultivated to sugar cane but for the greater part wild brush country dotted with patches of piney woods.
Morris, doing ten years for robbery and possession of marijuana, and a fellow inmate, William Martin, were members of a work gang cutting sugar cane and hauling it to the prison mill. About four o’clock on a drowsy afternoon in late April, 1955, they disappeared.
Warden Maurice Sigler said, “We don’t know how they got away.” Bloodhounds led searchers off the reservation to the shoulder of a road near the home of a black farmer, who returned that night to find the law waiting on his stoop. Yes, he had picked up two white hitchhikers and let them out at an oil refinery on the outskirts of Baton Rouge.
The fugitives spent a few months in New Orleans, cased the bank in the small town of Slidell across Lake Pontchartrain, then headed north to Kansas City where with a third partner, Earl Branci, they plotted the burglary. On Thanksgiving night they bored a hole in the rear wall of the bank, burned open two vaults, and lugged out $6,165—a heavy haul, as it was all in coins. They had a fling for a month and a half, and then the FBI walked into the motor court southwest of Baton Rouge, where they were staying with three women. Morris drew a federal term of fourteen years.…
That’s the way it had always been: a few months out, a few years in. And now, The Rock. What lay beyond Louisiana—the first wayward step that had set him off on the long, erratic road to Alcatraz? The day he ran away from home? What kid of eleven, even younger, has not entertained that notion? No, it all began that summer morning, an hour before daybreak, when, as a boy of fourteen, he silently worked loose the catch on the window screen and hoisted himself over the sill … it all began with two diamond rings, a lady’s wristwatch, and a fistful of money. Or so it might seem.
Perhaps it began late one night about six years before he was born. That was the night his mother, Clara, willful, hoydenish, slipped out of the home of her respectable, middle-class family and stole off to the neare
st city, a child of eleven. Clara was setting a course through childhood and teens that Frank, whether by chance or a genetic trait, would duplicate.
Picked up as a runaway, the child Clara was returned to her home, only to skip off again … again … again, until she landed in a school for wayward girls. Her temperament balked at restraint, and she soon left, one night after lights out, hitching a ride to Washington, D.C. In the nation’s capital, as elsewhere, a teenage girl does not roam the streets after midnight without drawing official attention. She was now approaching seventeen, and she went into a reformatory. Again she vanished, stealing a nurse’s uniform and money. During this interval of freedom she gave birth to a son she christened Frank Lee Morris, bestowing on him the name of a civil engineer whom she claimed, without evidence, she had married two months earlier, but who admittedly was not the father. Thus, in a sense, Frank Morris was born in and out of wedlock. The date: September 1, 1926.
Not long afterward, out of a reasonable fear she might destroy the baby during one of her uncontrollable rages, Frank was placed in a foster home. A sturdy, happy infant, he could stand in his foster mother’s lap at the age of six months.
Clara was lodged in a training school for girls and at first the reports were encouraging: “A good mixer, energetic and ambitious when she wants to be.… Makes a real effort to conquer her temper.… Does well in nursing course.” Signs of a mercurial nature began to appear. She developed ear trouble, spurned treatments, became noticeably deaf. She moped for Frankie, and they placed Frankie, a year old, in the institution with her. She was happy again, and diligent, full of great plans. She begged for release, that she might work for her baby.
A Catholic orphanage agreed to employ her, and Clara, cuddling her baby, was soon walking down a corridor to a new life, the spike heels of her cherry-colored slippers clicking confidently. The agency reported: “She is bright, honest, devoted to her child, a leader among the other girls.” In time the sisters discerned a strange quirk in her maternal instincts: she was deriving strength from the infant, rather than supplying it. She played with him, as a toy, and ignored the normal attention a child needs. The effect on Frankie was noticeable: he cried more in her presence than in her absence.
And then one day her quiescent temper erupted. She lit into a group of girls like a whirlwind; she emerged with a black eye, scratched face, and nerves so agitated it took three hours to calm her down. She attributed the outburst to her surroundings; she wanted to live in a real home. She went to church occasionally and believed in God, but: “God didn’t mean for me to suck my thumb all day.”
She was placed in a private home, to care for two small boys. She left Frankie at the orphanage, visiting him twice a week. The change was good for her son: “Frankie, a very sensitive child, has improved in health and disposition since separated from his mother.”
The home Clara entered was one of culture, and her new employer reported: “She is cheerful, energetic, a great help, and we are very pleased with her.” Clara had climbed another ecstatic peak, as quickly to descend it. She began to chatter incessantly—romantic, erratic tales of her husband and the magnificent home she planned to build. One day the maid discovered a silver butter knife secreted between the layers of Clara’s mattress—a gift, perhaps for Frankie—but the next day it was back in the silver drawer. She left abruptly, with the parting word: “I don’t want to be introduced to my friends as a servant.” After that, her visits to Frankie became less frequent, but each time she vowed: “I’m going to get a good job and take Frankie and hire a woman to care for him.”
This portrait of Frankie, age three, emerges: “A very pleasant, intelligent-looking child who understands all that is said, but talks very little. He is sturdy and runs about the halls, and the sisters make a great pet of him.”
A little later he was placed in a foster home, and his development duly reported: “He does and says only what he chooses. He digs in the backyard and when told to come in, he screams. He is made to sit in a chair as punishment. He dominates even older children.… Everyone who comes to the house spoils him because he is so cute, and he is a great favorite in the home.”
Two days after Christmas of 1929 Clara visited him, for the first time that year. Frankie, three years old, did not recognize her. She wore heavy makeup, spoke in a loud voice, and walked unsteadily. She brought Frankie a present, a bag of cheap candy, and tried to force him to take it.
The foster mother intercepted the bag. “He can’t have it now, it’ll spoil his appetite.”
“Aw, give the kid a good time,” Clara said. After an awkward moment, she said, “Well, I got to hurry back and cook supper for my man,” and weaved out to a car in which a man was waiting.
She returned at Easter. She was now a chorus girl at a burlesque theater, and she lived the role, cosmetically, offstage. She brought Frankie a little basket of colored candy and apologized: “I can’t stay, I got a friend outside.”
Frankie, at four: “A nice looking child, with a clear delicate skin and golden brown curls. Well behaved and likable. Inclined to be self-willed, but easily managed by anyone who understands him and whom he likes.”
Clara paid no visits during the next two Christmas seasons, but she suddenly appeared on the day after New Year’s 1932, so thin “she almost rattled.” The report shed further light: “She was dressed in a long black chiffon gown, black satin high-heeled slippers, a short black coat, and no hat. Her flaming red hair was tossed by the cold wind. She was made up in real theatrical style. She still refused to tell how or where she was living.” Again her post-yule gift to Frankie was a bag of cheap candy.
Late that month the foster mother suggested a place with larger grounds for Frankie, at six a bundle of energy. Furthermore, with babies in the home, she had another concern: he liked to scratch kitchen matches to hear them snap, then watch them burn to his fingertips. She reported: “While he gives the impression of being rough, he is really quite gentle and timid, and his blustering manner is only assumed.”
This surface behavior got him into trouble at school, but his subsurface gentleness got him out of it. Said his teacher: “I really don’t like to reprimand him because he’s such a nice boy.” This conflict between inner and outer self took serious turns: he stole small change from the teacher’s desk; he rifled other children’s lunch boxes; he snatched an orange from a little girl, although he had a tangerine in his own lunch box.
These actions occurred after sporadic visits of Clara—visits that had the effect of visitations. Frankie had no idea of his relationship to this woman whose gaudy getup, to a sensitive child, gave her the aspect of a dressed-up witch. Her appearances left him upset, excited for hours. The school principal, unaware of all this, one day asked the foster mother for permission to spank the boy.
A rural environment was tried. His reaction was normal for a city-bred child: the big dog and the horses terrified him. After two months the new foster mother reported: “He is not at all homesick, but he’s still very much afraid of the horses. He must have been told scary stories of wild animals. He is particularly afraid at night.”
Frankie seemed ashamed of his fears. At three, he was proud that he had not flinched, nor cried, at the vaccination needle. Now he found another way to display his manliness; he picked up a cat and threw it with all his might into a puddle on the frosty ground.
Five days after Christmas of that year, 1932, Clara materialized again, a more garish spectacle in contrast to the simplicity of the farm folk. With her was a man, and a woman who was even more flashily attired and more cosmetically emblazoned than Clara. It was forenoon, but both women wore evening gowns, somewhat rumpled. The fresh country air began to reek of stale liquor.
Frankie, eyes dilated, pressed hard against his foster mother as Clara stumbled near, her hair, a deeper scarlet, falling about her face. She held forth an unwrapped present and said, “See what Santa Claus brought? Look, it dances!” It was a monkey on a string, and it was worn and ra
gged. She jerked the string, and the monkey flapped grotesquely. She dangled the monkey in Frankie’s face. “Here, kid, take it!” Frankie kept his arms rigid, and the farm mother could feel the trembling of his body.
Clara held up the toy for the farm woman to inspect and grinned idiotically. “Looks kinda beat up, don’t he? Got it down on Seventh Street a week ago and been playin’ with it so much, not much left of him.” She leaned down, and her voice became animated. “Know what else I got you for Christmas, Frankie? At the Fox Theatre? A great big bag of oranges and nuts and candy!” Then she pouted and shook her head dolefully. “It’s all eaten up.”
Frankie never saw his mother again.
In the summer of 1937, now back in the capital and aged eleven, Frankie fell to brooding. One day he asked his new foster mother why the other children in the house had visitors but no one ever came to see him. She explained, gently, that he had no people. Her report on the episode said: “Really, it seemed to relieve his mind and he has been lighthearted ever since. I told him it would be a fine thing for him to say a prayer for his people, who are in heaven, and he’s been doing that.”
Escape from Alcatraz Page 17