by Paul Simpson
The mat shop was the scene of yet another group attempt on 14 April 1943. The four involved on this occasion were some of the most violent men on the island at the time: Floyd Hamilton, who had been Public Enemy Number One; kidnapper Fred Hunter; and bank robbers Harold Breast and James A. Boar-man. Around 9.30 a.m. the would-be escapees overpowered, bound and gagged Custodial Officer Smith, using home-made knives that they had smuggled into the room. When the Guard Captain Henry Weinhold realized that Smith wasn’t where he was meant to be, he investigated, and was also overpowered. With the two guards out of action, the prisoners jumped out of a rear window, and headed down the thirty-foot cliff to the water’s edge. They had already stripped to their underwear, and greased up, to provide some measure of protection against the cold of the bay. Their intention was to use cans as floats, but in their haste, they left two behind in the mat room. These also had army uniforms inside, which they were hoping to use as disguises once they reached the mainland.
While the prisoners were working out what to do, the guards started to open fire, or, as the San Francisco Chronicle described it, “Fusilade after fusilade spattered the waters with deadly slugs, peppering the surface with tiny geysers.” Smith had managed to work one hand into his pocket to retrieve his whistle which he then placed in Weinhold’s mouth. With bullets raining down on them, the prisoners started to swim for it. Boarman was hit in the back of the head, and Breast held him up for a time. However, when the prison launch came to pick them out of the water, Breast let go of the body and it sank. If Boarman wasn’t dead from the bullet, he would have quickly drowned. His body, however, was never located.
Hunter and Hamilton kept swimming. Hunter tried to find shelter in the caves underneath the cliffs, but bloodstains were spotted near the entrance, as if someone had been leaning on the rocks for support. The guards brought their boat around to the entrance and ordered him to surrender. When he didn’t come out, they fired a single round into the cave, which prompted Hunter to exit rapidly.
The search for Hamilton continued, but when no trace was found, Warden Johnston confidently told the press that he was positive that the gangster had been shot, and fallen into the water. It was therefore rather embarrassing for him when Hamilton was discovered by guard captain Weinhold three days later, still in the industrial building! He had been concealed in the same cave as Hunter, but hadn’t surrendered with his colleague. Instead, he had waited there considering his options before deciding to return to the prison. The Chronicle suggested that he was “[l]ike a bad little boy who ran away from home and came crawling back in trembling fear of a spanking”. Climbing the cliff, he re-entered the mat room through the same window he and his friends had used earlier, then hid himself in a pile of material where he was found by Weinhold who was searching for further evidence regarding the escape.
Four months later, Arkansas bank robber Ted Huron Walters, one of Floyd Hamilton’s associates, made his move, escaping from the prison laundry by sneaking through a door and over the fence. His presence was missed shortly after he had vanished, and five coastguard boats as well as the prison’s own launch patrolled the waters searching for him. He was eventually found hiding on the island beach, with the warden noting that he had been “balked by the cold tide”.
One of the earliest prisoners ensconced at Alcatraz thought he had found a foolproof way of getting off the island in July 1945, but ended up simply getting a tour of San Francisco Bay – and becoming an inadvertent star, after his story was told on the radio series Gang Busters later that year.
John Knight Giles was convicted for murder in Oregon, and while serving a life sentence there, had escaped from prison and gone on to try to rob the Denver and Rio Grande Western mail train. On recapture, he had been sent to McNeil Island, thence to Alcatraz in August 1935. Giles had bided his time, working as a prison dock stevedore for eight years before trying his escape. As he told one of the guards on his return, he “had his chance to get away – and had nothing to lose”.
Before he stepped on board an Army launch at 10.40 a.m. on 31 July 1945, Giles had diligently pulled together a military uniform, probably from the large number of service items that were cleaned at the prison laundry. Although the bags were regularly checked for contraband on their way in, it seems that nobody thought of correlating the numbers of garments on entrance and exit. Giles donned his borrowed staff sergeant’s uniform on the docks and stationed himself beneath the dock, armed only with a flashlight. He then joined the launch, the General Frank M. Coxe, by jumping through a freight hatch and proceeded to nonchalantly stare out to sea as the boat headed to Fort McDowell, claiming that he was a lineman working on the cable in that area.
What he didn’t realize was that standard operating procedure meant that the number of soldiers on board was regularly checked. When one extra soldier was noted, the guard on the Alcatraz dock was told; this tallied with the loss of one stevedore that the Alcatraz guards had just noticed themselves. Assistant Warden E.J. Miller therefore hurriedly went to the pier, and overtook the General Coxe in a speedboat, arriving at Fort McDowell before the Army launch.
Even before the Alcatraz authorities could claim him for their own, Giles was in trouble. The officer of the day, Lieutenant Gordon L. Kilgore, pulled him aside, because he wasn’t wearing the correct uniform. When he inspected the passes that Giles had also secretly prepared, he realized they were crude forgeries. Giles was preparing to argue when Assistant Warden Miller arrived to take him back to the Rock in handcuffs. The only question remaining was where Giles obtained the dog tags that he was wearing around his neck. Giles never explained, although he did tell the warden that “time means nothing to him – that he had everything to gain by trying to escape and nothing to lose. And he also said he had been planning a getaway since his imprisonment here in 1935.”
Everything that had come before on the Rock was overshadowed by events in May 1946, in what quickly came to be known as the Battle of Alcatraz. Two guards and three prisoners died; fourteen guards and one inmate were seriously wounded; two men went to the gas chamber for their involvement. It was a vicious affair, during which it was by no means certain that the prison authorities would get the upper hand. As Warden Johnston said, via telegram at 5.43 p.m. on the afternoon of the first day, “Our situation is difficult and precarious. Our officers are all being used in every place that we can man. The armed prisoners on the island are still eluding us so that at the moment we cannot control them. The Navy, coastguard and San Francisco Police Department are standing by to help when we find we can use them to our advantage.”
The first Warden Johnston knew of the impending problems was when he received a call at 2.30 p.m. on Thursday 2 May 1946 from the prison armorer. “There’s some trouble in the cell house. I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s bad,” he told Johnston. He had no idea how bad it was: some of Alcatraz’s worst prisoners had gained control of the gun gallery, a section that looked out over the cell block inside which armed prison officers kept watch, and therefore were in possession of guns.
Kentucky bank robber Bernard Paul Coy had carefully monitored all the various guards’ movements looking for any sign of weakness. When guard Bert Burch left the gun gallery in response to a call from his colleague, Cecil Corwin in the isolation block next door, Coy, who had been floor-sweeping in the main cell block overlooked by the gallery, knew that it was time to act. When guard William M. Miller let prisoner Marvin Franklin Hubbard into the cell block, Hubbard and Coy attacked him and took his keys. They let out Joseph P. Cretzer, who was eager to make up for his failed escape five years earlier, and a Choctaw Indian, Clarence Clarnes, one of the youngest prisoners on Alcatraz at the time.
Coy then smeared axle grease all over his body, and started to climb the West End gun gallery. Between his teeth was a bag in which he was carrying a bar-spreading device, which had been put together in the prison workshops, cannibalizing toilet fixtures. At the top of the gun cage, the bars curved over into a
sort of basket shape. Those bars proved the easiest to spread and once he had forced them apart, Coy had a gap of about five to seven inches, and eighteen inches between the cross-hatching to slide through. Once he had got through, Coy ran down the ladder within the gallery to the lower level. Grabbing a riot club, he hid beneath the window in the door.
Out in the cells, his accomplices started to make a racket. When Burch came to investigate, Coy slugged him, and although Burch put up a struggle to prevent Coy from gaining his weapon, the prisoner was able to get the advantage and then strangled the guard unconscious with his own tie. Then he started to pass the captured weapons – a rifle and a .45 revolver – as well as riot clubs out to the other prisoners. They captured officer Corwin, and placed him in a cell with Miller. They then freed a load of prisoners – at the time, Warden Johnston said that he believed it was as many as sixty; the official report afterwards indicated that it was only twelve. These included Sam Shockley and Miran Edgar Thompson, both of whom were extremely violent men. The one man whose help they could really do with – Rufus “Whitey” Franklin, a guard killer and escape artist – couldn’t be released from his cell because they couldn’t work the electrics. If he had been with them, it is possible that the prisoners could have found ways round some of the problems they encountered.
As further prison officers, including guard captain Henry H. Weinhold, entered the cell block, they were captured and locked up in two adjoining cells. For obvious reasons, they weren’t armed when they went in: guns were used only within the gun gallery. Another officer, who was in the basement, realized there was trouble, and rang the armorer who alerted the warden. At the same time, Associate Warden E.J. Miller went to investigate, and was faced with Coy wielding the rifle. Coy fired twice, setting fire to a gas canister that Miller was holding, leading Miller to believe that Coy had a machine gun – an assertion Johnston initially repeated in his notifications of the revolt to the mainland. The distress sirens began blaring out across San Francisco Bay, telling the world outside that there were major problems at the prison. Coastguard officers as well as Marines were despatched to Alcatraz to help the guards keep the other prisoners under control.
Using the weapons they had liberated, the prisoners started firing at the gun towers. They knew that if they could knock out two of them, they would have a clear run to the boats through the back door that led into the yard. However, they were still stuck inside the cell block: they hadn’t found the key for the outside door. Although they believed that Miller had given them all his keys, he had kept the most important one from them; he hid it in the toilet of the cell where he and the other guards were held hostage. When they realized that they hadn’t got the key, the escape attempt turned into a battle for control of the prison itself. “Well that does **** it up,” Cretzer was heard saying when he knew he didn’t have either the key or the benefit of Rufus Franklin’s experience. “San Francisco is just as far away as ever.” At that point, goaded by Thompson and Shockley, Cretzer started firing into one of the two cells containing the prison guards, shooting Captain Weinhold, fatally wounding Miller, and injuring junior guard Ernest Lageson.
Determined to regain control of the prison, and rescue his captured men, Warden Johnston prepared a strike team. Led by Lt Phil Bergen and Lt Frank, they managed to reach the first storey of the gun gallery, with various guards trying to provide covering fire against the barrage coming from the prisoners. During this exchange, guard Harold Stites was shot, as were three others. After the guards retreated carrying Stites, he was pronounced dead. The others were sent to hospitals on the mainland. The electricity was cut off within the prison.
Bergen and four other guards returned to the gun gallery, from where they could report back to the warden, who ordered a further assault. At 10 p.m., a group of fourteen officers led by the associate warden burst into the cell block. Although they managed to close the door between the cell block and the isolation wing, they came under heavy fire.
At this, the Marines started to bomb the isolation block, believing that that was where the majority of the ringleaders were hiding. Holes were drilled in the ceiling and tear gas grenades were thrown in. Eventually, after Robert Stroud – who would become famous as the “Birdman of Alcatraz” – managed to persuade Bergen that there were no weapons inside the block, nor were the men they were seeking there, the barrage was better aimed.
Things were quieter on the second day, and there was even a brief attempt by some of the prisoners to cut a deal with the warden; he wasn’t in the mood to negotiate. They either surrendered, or he continued with the assault. They didn’t surrender.
It became clear that the prisoners were holed up in a utility corridor in the main cell block, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a tunnel-like passage with a door at either end of an almost impregnable spot”. A pattern began: one guard would jerk the door to the corridor open, and another would fire a shotgun blast down the corridor. Then the door would be slammed shut. In-between shotgun rounds, fragmentation grenades were dropped in from above. On the third morning, squads of guards kept rushing into the cell block firing repeatedly into the narrow corridor, and at 9.40 a.m., they were finally able to enter it without resistance. There they found the bodies of Cretzer, Coy, and Hubbard: Cretzer and Coy probably died the night before, Hubbard that morning. A handful of convicts, who only ever had one rifle and a pistol between them, had held the prison authorities at bay for two days. No one had escaped.
Although Thompson and Shockley had retreated to their cells on the first night, after realizing that they were in over their heads, they were prosecuted for the murder of prison officer William Miller, alongside Clarence Carnes. Thompson and Shockley – whose IQ was said to be 54, just over half the average – were sentenced to death, and were executed side by side in the gas chamber at San Quentin on 3 December 1948. A prison guard who witnessed their execution simply said, “That makes it five to two. It’s a little more even now.”
Apart from a short-lived abortive escape by Arkansas bank robber Ted H. Walters to abscond from the new prison laundry in August 1948 – he got as far as the shore on the south-west corner of Alcatraz Island but couldn’t summon up the courage to risk the waters – there weren’t many notable attempts at escaping from the Rock during the decade following the Battle of Alcatraz. Warden Johnston retired in 1948, and was succeeded by Edwin Swope, who served until 1955. The third Warden was someone who already knew the problems of the prison, because he had come up through the ranks: Paul Madigan.
There were two key escape attempts during Madigan’s wardenship. Murderer Floyd P. Wilson – who killed the manager of a food store he was holding up to try to get the $17 he needed to buy some coal for his freezing wife and five children – was initially believed to have tried to get away on the prison’s water barge, which brought fresh water supplies over to the Rock. On 23 July 1956, he was working on the docks, and was present at 3.25 p.m. in a line-up carried out when the water barge was due to be towed; twenty minutes later, he was gone. Two young boys claimed that they had seen a man in shorts swimming across a cove not far from where the water barge docked on its return to the mainland, but careful inspection of all the small boats in the area revealed nothing.
That wasn’t too surprising. Wilson was no luckier on Alcatraz than he had been in the outside world. During his abortive robbery, he had left $10,000 in the car next to the man he murdered. On the Rock, he simply slipped away from the gang he was working with, apparently under cover of smoke from a rubbish-burning fire – the departure of the barge was a complete coincidence. He didn’t get far: he was found by the water’s edge at 2.45 a.m. on 24 July, wet and shivering, near the foot of the cliffs on the south end of the Rock. When asked whether it was true that Wilson was captured because he couldn’t swim, Warden Madigan simply said: “We don’t know. How could we?”
The other escape that Madigan had to deal with did look for a time as if it had been successful. Although one of th
e pair of prospective fugitives was captured quickly, the fate of the other wasn’t known for some time, and newspaper reports were considering the first “impossible” escape from the Rock.
The FBI’s former Public Enemy Number One from 1949, Clyde Johnson teamed up with gunman Aaron Walter Burgett. Both men had been working on the rubbish detail outside the prison for about six months; shortly after 3 p.m. on 29 September 1958 Burgess grabbed their guard, Custodial Officer Harold Miller by the shoulder and swung him round. Johnson held a knife to his chin.
Although they had planned the escape some time earlier, the two men had waited for Daylight Savings Time to end, so darkness would fall earlier; they also wanted the cover of fog, which fell for the first time that season.
Telling Miller that if he behaved, he wouldn’t get hurt, the two prisoners covered the guard’s eyes, lashed his wrists and gagged him, then guided him down the hill, tying him to a eucalyptus tree. Perhaps in an effort to put pursuers off their scent, they also explained that they had a getaway launch waiting out in the fog in the bay, outside the 200-yard cordon, ready to spirit them away.
Their absence was spotted at 3.40 when Miller’s colleagues realized that he hadn’t returned. They found him lying in the bushes behind the guards’ houses on the south-east side of the island, and raised the alarm. Thirty sets of two-man teams were formed from the guards, who began a thorough check of the shoreline; coastguard boats circled the island looking for the getaway launch or any sign of the two men, while a helicopter circled overhead watching in case the launch broke out of the fog bank. Within an hour of Miller’s discovery, a crewman on a coastguard patrol boat spotted Johnson, standing just off shore, up to his waist in water on the west side of the island. “We made a good try, and it just didn’t work,” Johnson commented, and apologised to Associate Warden Joseph B. Latimer – although the warden noted, “I think Johnson’s sorry he failed.”