In with the Devil

by James Keene

  Hurrying back to the interview room with Randolph, Miller suggested that they tape Larry as well as get his statement. That way, a jury would know that the confession was not coerced. But to Miller’s surprise, Randolph refused. FBI policy prevented him from tape-recording a confession. Instead, from what he recalled of Larry’s confession, Randolph wrote down a statement in his own scrawling hand on two blank sheets of paper and then asked Hall to sign each one. Miller countersigned as a witness. Neither lawman noticed that the document began, “I, Larry DeWayne Daniels.” In his haste to get everything down, Randolph had copied the format from another statement and forgot to change the last name from Daniels to Hall. Also, neither he nor Miller balked when Hall block-printed his name instead of signing it in script.

  What Hall told Randolph was still not enough for Miller. He wanted more details about the Jessica Roach abduction that could only be known by her killer. Since Miller wanted to record his conversation with Larry, the FBI agent got up and left the room. But now that they were alone, when Miller pulled out the tape recorder, Larry objected. He explained that he did not want to ever hear his own voice repeating the horrible things he was about to describe. Miller had to be content with notes.

  Throughout the day, as Larry talked to Randolph and Miller, the Wabash cops hovered outside the interrogation room in anticipation. During a break, Jeff Whitmer walked in and handed Hall a can of pop. “He was sitting there all slumped over and all upset,” Whitmer remembers. “I put my hand on his shoulder and I said, ‘Larry, it will be all right.’ He looked up at me and he said, ‘No, it’s not all right and it’s never going to be all right.’ ”

  5.

  Breakfast with Baby Killers

  By bumping into Larry in the dining hall so soon after his arrival in Springfield, Jimmy Keene had violated every admonition that had been laid down by the FBI agents and U.S. marshals. As Hall backed away from him, Keene thought about pushing past, as though it had been an accidental bump and nothing more, but he spoke to Hall instead: “Hey, excuse me, man,” he said. Then, “Hey, you look cool. Do you know where I can find the prison library?”

  Hall was again startled. “It’s in this building,” he said in a drawl that sounded slurred by medication. He pointed down the hall. “I go there to read the paper every day. Do you want me to show you where?”

  Keene said he did, but Larry stayed rooted and asked, “You think I’m cool?”

  “Hell, yeah. Look at the other guys around you.”

  Hall laughed. As they walked down the corridor, Jimmy tried to size him up out of the corner of his eye. It was bad enough that he had practically knocked Hall over. How could he have also called him “cool”? This was the last person in the world that anyone would call cool. But if Larry was suspicious, he didn’t show it. He just ambled forward with no expression on his face.

  When they reached the library, he turned and went inside. It was tiny compared to Keene’s old workplace in Milan. Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, but there were only two metal tables for reading. Hall flipped through a rack that kept newspapers on long sticks. He fished one out and sat down. Keene did likewise—barely noticing what he pulled—and sat opposite Hall. When Jimmy snuck a peek, he was surprised to see Larry reading the Wabash Plain Dealer, but he learned later that the prison would, upon request, subscribe to any inmate’s hometown paper.

  Hall methodically turned each page and scanned it from top to bottom before he went on to the next. When he finished, he got up, returned the paper to the rack, and left without any further acknowledgment of Keene. But Jimmy had acted as if he were paying no attention to Hall, either.

  Later that morning, Keene had his first doctor’s appointment with the Medical Center’s chief psychiatrist. According to Beaumont, the doctor would be Keene’s only contact in Springfield who knew his real reason for being there, but when the doctor came out to the waiting room to greet Jimmy, he gave him a quick, officious handshake. He was in his fifties, tall and thin with glasses and a professorial air. As with the other medical staff at Springfield, he always wore a tie and was either in shirtsleeves or a suit. Without saying a word, he glanced at Jimmy’s file as he led him into his closetlike office. But once the door closed, Keene says, “The masks came off.” The doctor tossed the file aside and perched on the edge of his desk.

  “I know what the whole plan is,” he said, “and I’m completely behind it. If anything happens, I’ll be the guy to get you out. If you have any problems with the guards, tell them you need to see me and I’ll be right there to help.”

  He had placed Keene in a cell directly across from Hall. He’d also helped concoct a new rap sheet for Jimmy that had him smuggling arms across state lines—a crime that was more likely to put him in Springfield than drug dealing. The official diagnosis for Keene would be severe depression—Jimmy had already been diagnosed with mild depression in Milan—and they would use complications from Jimmy’s allergies as an excuse to keep him under the direct care of the chief psychiatrist.

  Before Keene left his office, his contact wanted to give him one last warning. “Be careful of these prisoners. Most of them are under medication, but they can be very unpredictable. We can’t have you getting in any fights.” The doctor wasn’t just worried about blowing Jimmy’s cover. He was also concerned that his own participation in Beaumont’s scheme would become known. “Long after you’re gone, I still have to deal with the patients here,” he told Keene. “I’ve spent many years developing a reputation as someone they can trust. That will all be lost if they think I’m working with the government against one of them.”

  To some extent, his concern came as no surprise to Keene. “Nobody in prison likes a narc,” he says. Even the guards who try to get prisoners to snitch on each other have contempt for the ones who do. But Jimmy was starting to learn that the issue of privacy rose to a whole new level at Springfield: the medical staff really did see the inmates as patients first and prisoners second. If word of Keene’s mission got out, the doctor’s colleagues would condemn it as much as any inmate.

  That night, after dinner, when everyone else had returned to his cell, Jimmy was surprised to see that Hall’s cell was empty. For some reason, Larry had the run of the place along with privileges that most of the other prisoners did not have. Only later, when Keene’s door was locked down along with the others on the floor, did he see that Hall had returned. The upper wicket in his cell door had been left open and light from the inside shone out. As his head went by, the narrow beam would blink on and off. With their meeting that morning and Hall now so close, Keene’s mission no longer seemed so impossible. Perhaps it could be over in weeks instead of months. Jimmy kept peeking out at Hall’s cell until the light went out. It was like watching money in the bank.

  If the bizarre and mostly hidden challenges of Springfield could be summed up in one prisoner, he would be Clayton Fountain. Trained to kill by the Marines, he first put those skills to use on his staff sergeant in 1974. Once in the civilian correctional system, he joined the Aryan Brotherhood and rose in their ranks as an enforcer with at least two murders to his credit, in both cases plunging barely sharpened metal into the vital organs of his victims. When the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) built the Administrative Maximum facility—or Super Max—in Marion, Illinois, it was expressly designed to be the end of the line for lethal federal inmates like Fountain, with systems and structures to provide an unprecedented level of security. Still, once inside, Fountain managed to get at a rival gang leader, stabbing him sixty-seven times, while screaming, “Die, bitch, die.” He then dragged the bloody corpse the length of the tier before returning to his cell. The next year, in 1983, he found a way to slip his handcuffs and repeatedly stab three of Marion’s correctional officers, killing one and crippling another.

  The media dubbed Fountain “America’s Most Dangerous Inmate,” but his Super Max rampage against the guards did more than embarrass the BOP. It also posed a difficult question: since Fo
untain could no longer stay in Marion, then where was the end of the line after the end of the line?

  The answer, oddly enough, was not another Super Max, but somewhere that sounds much more bucolic: the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners (MCFP), in Springfield, Missouri. Far from state-of-the-art, Springfield is a relic, with buildings dating back to 1933, when it was the first medical facility in the federal prison system. If it is known for anything, it’s as the place where old Mafia dons go to die, since it holds one of the few hospitals where the BOP can treat critically ill prisoners in a secure setting (even in the operating room, handcuffs are not removed until the patient is unconscious). But in addition to medical patients, Springfield also houses nearly three hundred men with chronic psychiatric disorders. Some can erupt in savage and unpredictable ways. As a result, the MCFP has developed a wide array of strategies for dealing with violent behavior. Some go back to the days of Alcatraz, which shipped its own hard cases to Springfield when they went crazy or fell ill. Fountain’s MCFP treatment plan could have come from that bygone era. For the next decade after his arrival, he lived in a cage inside a cage—a contraption that cost $40,000 to build. He was prohibited from touching any person, including his mother, and ate only with a plastic spoon. On those rare occasions when he was taken out of his twofold containment, the Springfield News-Leader reported in 1989, “His legs [are] locked with irons, his wrists frozen with two sets of handcuffs. With every movement, a sea of guards surrounds him like an armada.”*

  Over its many decades, Springfield has not just held the nation’s most violent prisoners, such as Fountain, but also the most passive—the terminally ill, hunger strikers, and conscientious objectors—who presented their own challenges. Indeed, much about the institution’s history is as bipolar as any inmate it’s ever had to treat. Although no household name like Leavenworth or Alacatraz, Springfield has still incarcerated, if only briefly, some of the most famous inmates in the history of the Bureau of Prisons, including Robert “Birdman” Stroud, who made his name at the two more famous penitentiaries but spent his last years at the MCFP. Although no prisoner has ever escaped Springfield for more than a few hours, within its walls there can be remarkable freedom for a favored few, and even a measure of protection against the federal prosecutors who put them there. Meanwhile, the treatment of other inmates has fluctuated wildly from progressive experimentation to old-fashioned repression.

  The Medical Center’s split personality is rooted in the 1930 congressional act that created it, giving oversight of the facility to both the U.S. Public Health Service and what was then the embryonic Bureau of Prisons. Although the designated inmates were indelicately defined as “Defective Delinquents,” the law held forth an ambitious mandate: to both treat their illness and cure their criminal conduct through “study, classification and rehabilitation,” in essence making the MCFP a penitentiary petri dish for behavior modification. With such faith in the potential of science, Congress gave medical staff the upper hand in running the place with the convoluted requirement that the superintendant be a physician—but still appointed by the attorney general with the approval of the surgeon general.

  The doctors clearly called the shots in designing the MCFP’s compound and architecture. As opposed to the cement-block fortresses of Leavenworth and Alcatraz, Springfield has the institutional brick exterior more common to the big psychiatric hospitals that were then springing up in the Northeast. A total of ten buildings were planned, none taller than five stories. At the center of the complex, four of the largest structures are connected by low walls, creating a quadrangle to surround the massive prison yard. In the final architectural drawing for the site, the ring of rust-hued buildings, swaddled by lush green grass and trees, looks more like a Tuscan village than a penitentiary.

  In reality, the Springfield compound was flatter and much more barren than the one depicted in the architect’s drawing. What made it most attractive to prison authorities was not the landscape but the location. It sat, like a bull’s-eye, at the center of the continental United States—equidistant from penitentiaries on either coast—which would reduce the overall costs of transportation for the prisoners who needed immediate care in the hospital.

  Nothing is more surprising about the MCFP’s early history than the eagerness of Springfield, Missouri, to embrace it. Today, few public projects would be less welcome in our backyards than a prison or a psychiatric hospital, let alone a combination of the two. But in 1931, at the depths of the Depression, Springfield’s civic leaders saw the murderers and madmen as manna from heaven. They would rain down on the local economy with $3 million in construction funds to house them, hundreds of jobs to care for them, and countless contracts from local vendors to keep them fed and clothed. As earnest money to secure a deal with the government, Springfield’s Chamber of Commerce raised $142,000 in notes to purchase the 445-acre site (previously considered for a golf course), which it then handed over gratis to the U.S. attorney general. The fund-raising campaign took only six weeks, bringing in contributions from businesses and individuals across the region, and was trumpeted by a Springfield Daily News headline as the “Greatest Triumph in History of City.” The accompanying article also touts the complex as “the largest hospitalization project ever attempted by the federal government” and explains, with modern-sounding “stimulus” spin, “The program is in line with President Hoover’s plan to relieve unemployment over the country by stepping up federal building projects.”

  In this and other newspaper reporting from those early, boosterish days, there is little mention of “Defective Delinquents” or the Medical Center’s dual mission to treat psychiatric as well as physical illness. Stories focused instead on the bonanza for local building contractors and the pace of construction.

  Neighbors did not get their first look behind the brick walls until July 1935—two years after the Medical Center first received inmates—when the Springfield Leader and Press ran a four-day series written by columnist Docia Karell. Her reverent and breathless tone is summed up in the headline for the kickoff piece: “Government’s Battle to Reclaim ‘Lost Men’ at Medical Center Here Holds Interest of Entire Nation.” Although billed as the “inside story,” the introduction explains that it is also the “official story,” vetted by the hospital administration.

  No doubt the series was partly intended—by both the editors and prison officials—to dispel rumors that were frightening the community. Karell repeats some of the “Strange Tales Told,” but she is so ambiguous that it’s hard to know exactly which tale is really false. She writes:

  Stories get abroad, of course. Some of them perhaps are not true at all. Others undoubtedly were born of truth, though they may have outgrown it. Some are stories of odd characters or one-time prominent persons living there. Others are stories of violence within the walls, of rioting and fighting, when prisoners get out of bounds and tear down even the fire extinguishers to hurl as weapons. There is belief in Springfield that at times like these officials send in haste for the Catholic chaplain to come and quiet the turbulent men—that this quiet clergyman has “some strange power” over them. . . . It is related that some of the most famous and dangerous criminals in the country are in the hospital here, entered even with aliases on the prison records.

  Although Karell calls some of the stories “absurd,” she also adds, “Undoubtedly it is true that even those which have a basis in fact are often much exaggerated. Partly, of course, these tales and their exaggerations grow out of the very secrecy which shrouds the place.”

  But some readers could have found Karell’s facts even more disturbing than the rumors. She reports that the Medical Center had just 44 guards to watch over 475 prisoners. Of these, 285 had DD or DEFECTIVE DELINQUENT stamped on their denim shirts, and the rest were “trusties” (trusted inmates), who helped operate the facility and were known as PCs, because they could stay in a low-security prison camp. No matter how well behaved the trusties were, the ratio of prisoners to
correctional officers was ridiculously high (by today’s standards for a high-security federal prison it should be no more than four to one). Staffing aside, Karell describes MCFP security as state-of-the-art. “Stout locks and armed guards help to keep it impregnable,” she gushes. “At night, powerful lights can play upon the whole place [as needed], bringing every wall and corner to a bright, shadowless visibility so that there is no place for one to lurk in successful hiding, or to move unseen. At any hour, the screaming steam sirens are waiting to broadcast the warning that a man has escaped.”

  But despite these “impregnable” defenses, within weeks of the MCFP’s opening, at least two prisoners had escaped. They were caught soon after, but a few more guards were immediately hired, and security was stepped up another notch. So it would go for much of the MCFP’s early history as the medical administrators’ best intentions for treatment would be slapped back by the conduct of their prisoner patients.

  Karell may have best summed up the divided soul of the Medical Center with her introduction of its first superintendent, Dr. Marion King, for whom “the inmates are men as well as patients, and patients as well as prisoners.” The life in the complex that she goes on to describe sounds more like a summer camp than a prison, where days start with nourishing breakfasts in the cafeteria, followed by hearty work in the Medical Center’s feedlots and fields (more than one hundred acres were under cultivation), afternoon games of baseball in the prison yard, and evenings spent painting in the crafts shop or learning foreign languages in classrooms. Sunday mornings are devoted to church, and evenings to watching movies in the auditorium. Karell gets so swept up in the wholesome bustle that she wonders why these prisoners were sentenced in the first place. “Mostly they are a good-natured gang. . . . Some of them are unusually handsome. They look like kids that started out to do a little general hell-raising out of sheer exuberance, meaning no harm, and got into trouble by accident.”