Alcatraz (34 page)

Barker convinced an inmate in the blacksmith shop to make some saw blades from an old wood saw to cut through the soft metal of the old flat bars still in place in the doors of the cells in D block. Then he had the inmate make a bar spreader or screw jack—a round metal rod about a half inch in diameter and four inches long, with a bolt on the screw and a groove on the bolt. When the bolt was turned with pliers or a wrench, tension was created that caused a bar to bend.

The next task was getting these tools into the cell house. It would be nearly impossible for inmates to smuggle them in, because they had to pass through a metal detector and pat-down frisks on their return from
the industries area each day. When the staff asked an inmate machinist to build a device to sharpen the blades of safety razors, Barker saw the solution to this problem: he arranged with the machinist to hide the saw blades and bar spreader in the interior working parts of the razor-sharpening device. The machinist gave the finished device to an officer, who carried it up to the cell house, thereby bypassing the metal detector and body search. The sharpening machine was taken to A block and left for an inmate who would begin working on the worn blades.

Stamphill received saw blades and bar spreader on a day when, as part of his work as orderly, he was permitted to move around the cell house. He knew that a toilet in a cell on the second tier of D block had been removed for repairs, leaving a gaping hole in the back wall of the cell that was easily seen by inmates living across the corridor in C block. (The interior side of D block held no prisoners because like A block it had not been remodeled by the Bureau of Prisons.) Stamphill climbed up the stairs to the second tier and crawled through the hole into the utility corridor, the ventilation and plumbing area that divided the east and west sides of each cell block. He called out to Rufus McCain, who was locked up in one of the isolation cells on the other side of D block; when he responded, Stamphill crawled up pipes to the flat top of D block and down to the third tier on the other side in order to lower the tools through the railing. Then Stamphill reversed his journey, climbed back through the hole in the wall of the cell facing C block, and resumed his general housekeeping work around the main cell house. He told Barker, “Well, the stuff’s over in D block. So he got into a fight and they locked him up in D block.” Barker then recruited three inmates—Rufe McCain, Henry Young, and a black convict named William Martin—to participate in the break. According to Young, the four inmates began cutting the flat bars in front of their cells with Dock Barker humming, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”
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Three of the co-conspirators in D block had been allowed to move to cells near each other on the ground-floor level, which allowed them to easily communicate and exchange the tools. Furthermore, these particular cells were located on the far side of the two concrete vestibules that extended three and a half feet out from the row of cells to serve as solitary confinement cells; these obstructions blocked the view of the guard who looked down on their side of D block cells from the gun cage located on the north wall.

Using the tools provided by Stamphill, the four inmates began cutting the flat bars in front of their cells. The bottom of each bar in the lower
section of each cell door was held to the frame by a rivet—so when the top was severed, the bar could be pushed to either side, leaving a hole some ten by sixteen inches through which a man could crawl. Once they were able to free themselves from their cells, the inmates could begin working on the bars of a window in the outer wall of the cell block. This was a riskier procedure because the window was not hidden from the view of the guard in the gun gallery.

By studying the movements of the gun gallery guards, the inmates had learned that the officer on duty left the D block side of the gallery at meal times to help supervise the general population prisoners in the dining room and the flow of inmates as they moved from the main cell blocks to and from the dining room. At meals the four men waited until the guard moved out of the D block side of the gallery. When he disappeared, Henry Young climbed up to the third tier of cells and took up his post as a lookout. The others took turns working on the interior set of bars covering the window. These bars constituted a serious obstacle since, unlike the cell bars, they were made of tool-proof steel and were resistant to the cutting blades. Here the bar spreader was essential. The men took turns laboring with the device, first pressing one of the curved bars to one side and then applying pressure to the other side of the bar, moving the bar ever so slightly in one direction and then in the other. When the guard was about to come back to his post, they returned to their cells and pulled the cut bars in the cells back into place, making them temporarily secure with a mixture of paint and floor wax.
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After days of work on the interior window bars, the inmates succeeded in snapping the bar at its weakest point—the section where it was welded to the frame. There now was an opening twelve inches wide and fourteen inches high—big enough for each man to squeeze through. The prisoners moved on to the next barrier, a set of old, soft, flat metal bars affixed to the outside of the window. These bars presented no more resistance than the flat bars of the cells, and they were soon cut. To resecure these bars the inmates used a puttylike substance comprised of tooth powder and the paint used in routine maintenance of the cell block.

In his account of this escape, Henry Young commented on the need for other convicts in D block who could see what was happening not only to keep quiet about the escape attempt but to make sure that their usual jawing and calling out to each other between cells did not fall off as they watched Barker and the others saw away on the two sets of bars in the window of the outer wall. Dale Stamphill explained this absence of leaks as follows: “You always worried [in prison] about somebody finding
out about a thing like [an escape] and snitching on you. But Alcatraz was one place where every time that somebody’d become aware of somebody trying to escape, nobody would say a word. I guess they was afraid of what would happen to them.”

While the four men in D block were working on the bars, Stamphill had to get himself locked up in disciplinary segregation or be left behind. This step proved to be more difficult than he expected. In late October he picked a fight with another inmate but found himself locked up not in D but in A block. Trying to get moved from A to D he raised a commotion, but that resulted only in his being moved into one of the solitary cells in A block; six days later he was returned to general population. His next effort involved smuggling a knife into his cell and making sure it would be discovered during a routine shakedown. He was locked up for possessing the knife, but again in A block. Finally in mid-December he was moved to D block, where his only task was to cut the bars in the lower front section of his own cell, all the other work on the outside wall window and grill having been completed by the other four men. But the saw blades, by the time Stamphill got them, were so worn down that he could not cut the inch-and-a-half-wide flat bar. To reduce the area to be cut he began working on the bars of the cell door rather than the bars that covered the front of the cell; the door bars were square rather than flat and were about one-half inch wide. He was able to cut through two of the bars but only at one point and he told the others that he would have to have their help in bending the bars down far enough to expose an opening wide enough for him to squeeze through.

When the bars on Stamphill’s cell were cut, the prisoners dropped the cutting tools down their toilets and waited for a night when fog would provide cover for their escape. The tension they experienced is reflected in notes they passed among themselves; these notes, thrown down their toilets, were retrieved later by guards when they searched the cell block after the escape.

—Henry how many rounds did the Bull make while I was trying to sleep? Give him time to git out good for he may walk right back. That was his second, he is staying out longer tonight than last night. . . . We are going to take it the next round. Take one of your sheets along, the best one—roll it up tight as we may need a rope to get down the cliff. It won’t take but a minute to go out that hole so the bull in the cage would have to be mighty restless to wheel back so quick. No good yet, but ready to go anytime.

—I hear someone moving—is that you? Doc wasn’t asleep all night so he is getting some now. He said that if it gets good enough [to go] to punch
him awake as he got all his clothes on. I can’t tell from where I am. I am leaving it up to Doc.

—There is nothing to it yet for I can see the Frisco light. We couldn’t get a break on the time like this anyway.

—Yes things are lit up like Christmas but there is a lot [of fog] out there it may be here anytime. No breeze.

—Henry I have lost so much sleep I can’t stay wake but have shoes on and clothes like fire man it will take just one minute so will sleep but if things get right, there looks like a lot of fog out there, if O.K. clear your throat.

—This stuff [fog] sure comes and goes fast. Now I can’t see the lights in Frisco. Dale told me yesterday that he had a sure way of telling. Can you see the light out front?
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On the evening of January 12, 1939, the inmates got what they were waiting for: a heavy fog shrouded the prison. The Alcatraz lighthouse keeper noted in his log that continuous fog began to roll in beginning about 10:15
P.M
. and that the visibility was “practically nil.” The convicts in D block knew that there were three counts during the night: at midnight, at 3:00
A.M
., and at 6:00
A.M
. Shortly after the 3:00
A.M
. count, the gun cage officer walked through the door in D block to provide coverage for a guard making counts in the other cell blocks. Barker, Young, Martin, and McCain dislodged the precut bars in their cell fronts, squeezed out into the corridor and crossed the sixteen-foot area to the outer wall. Martin walked quickly over to Stamphill’s cell and pushed the door bars down by standing on them, allowing their confederate to join the group at the window.

The window bars were quickly dislodged, and with some boosting and shoving—particularly to get William Martin through, since he was a much larger man than the others—the five men climbed through the window, dropped eight feet to the ground below, and made their way toward the end of the island closest to San Francisco. They picked up pieces of wood and wooden lawn chairs as they crossed in back of the employee living quarters. When they reached the cliffs, the group split up.

Barker and Stamphill, with no flotation gear, found concrete steps leading down to the water’s edge and immediately started out into the bay, hoping to catch an outgoing tide. “We got about twenty or thirty feet,” Stamphill recalled, “and hit the tide, which just whipped us right around back to the shore.” They decided to move toward an old dock, where they hoped to find some lumber they could tear off for flotation, thinking that they hadn’t been gone long enough yet for their absence to have been detected. But the escape siren had already wailed, its sound obscured
to the escapees by the many foghorns sounding around them, and guards both on and off duty had been mustered, armed, and sent to different parts of the island to search for the escapees.

Stamphill and Barker were unaware that Officer Clifford Ditmer, who had drawn a Thompson submachine gun from the armory, was standing on the cliffs above them. At first Ditmer could not see the water through the fog, but as he watched, a gust of wind blew some of the fog away from the cove at the base of the cliffs and he was just able to make out two white shapes moving from the shore into the water. Ditmer warned the men to stop and when they continued to move he opened up with the Thompson, firing a half dozen shots into the water in front of the forms; the forms continued moving, at which point he aimed directly at them and fired a longer burst. He saw both men go down in the shallow water. More shots were fired from the prison launch, which was now standing close offshore and shining its lights on the cove. Stamphill thought all the gunfire was coming from the launch: “This boat came around and they just opened fire—never said a word, just opened fire with a machine gun; they knocked us both down.”

Both men were shot in the legs and fell in the shallow water. Barker, writhing in pain, raised up on his elbows to shift his weight, another fusillade sprayed in the water around him with one bullet hitting him in the head. He gasped to Stamphill, “Don’t move, they’re going to kill us.”

In the meantime, Henry Young and Rufe McCain had descended the cliffs at a different location and frantically tried to make a raft out of rolled up bed sheets and the pieces of wood and chairs they had picked up on the way down to the shore.

Before they could launch the raft, they were discovered by Lt. Henry Weinhold, who with Lt. Isaac Faulk was near the road tower.

We heard shots being fired whereupon we immediately ran down to the lower road to a point overlooking the cove on the beach immediately below the Road Tower and I began firing into the cove at some faintly white shadows, firing three to five shots to the best of my recollection. I then went . . . to the edge of the lower road overlooking the cove and instructed the officer in charge of the Road Tower to turn his light on the cove and after more light had been brought to bear on the water edge in the cove two pairs of legs could be distinguished.

I then proceeded to the Sea Wall and as I arrived the Launch
McDowell
came around the northeast corner of the island throwing its searchlight along the beach. A makeshift raft was floating in the water near the end of the sea wall. I threw my flashlight along the beach toward the west side
of the Island and saw two men, one naked and the other clad in a pair of drawers. I called to them to surrender and they came around the ledge of the rock with their hands in the air. I then identified them as inmates Rufus McCain no. 267 and Henry Young no. 244.
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