The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (55 page)

The coming of the twentieth century saw some ingenuity enter the prisoners’ planning. In 1898, some blatant nerve meant that three men were able to escape. Edgar M. Sweeney, H.R. Beale and John Meredith were working as stage managers for a prisoners’ concert, and escaped through a door at the back of the stage in the prison chapel (or possibly the library – the newspaper reports vary). They headed for the wharf, and stole a boat under the nose of the sentry on duty. Although they muffled the oars, the sentry heard them, and opened fire. The fifth shot hit one of the prisoners, who dropped to the bottom of the boat and started groaning.

At that point Sweeney called out, “Don’t shoot any more. Don’t you see we’ve got no oars?” (and possibly claimed that they were fishermen). The guard stopped firing, and began to explain the situation to his superiors, and while his attention was elsewhere, Sweeney and his comrades started rowing again. By the time that the prison boat set off after them, Sweeney had too much of a head start, and they reached the mainland.

In early April 1906, four prisoners thought that a butter vat might provide suitable transport across the bay, and liberated one from the bakery. Unfortunately, Arthur Armstrong, George W. Davis, Thomas Stinnatt and George W. Brossman had no way of controlling the vat to counter the effects of the wind and the tide, and they soon found themselves back on Alcatraz, and very soon after that, in irons. In February 1907 three men tried the same trick using a dough-kneading trough, but encountered similar problems. They had managed to keep the trough hidden for a month after stealing it from the bakery, while making some oars, but it wasn’t seaworthy, and pitched them into the sea when they were only a few feet from the shore.

A deserter from the 5th Cavalry used a log as a flotation device later in 1907 and very nearly made it to shore; unfortunately for August Stilke, just as he approached the Union Street dock on the night of 22 October, he was hit by a ferry steamer. The crew brought him aboard, bringing his escape to a premature end.

One daring prisoner simply forged his own release papers while on the island in 1910. He presented them at the office, and departed the Rock on the San Francisco ferry, never to be heard from again. He was following in the footsteps of Joseph White, John L. Moore, Cornelius Stokes and James Darling, who used forged pardons to escape from the prison in 1903 – in Stokes’ case only five days before a genuine pardon was heading his way. The forgeries were probably compiled on Alcatraz, and then mailed to the prison by an accomplice on the outside, a messenger who deserted as soon as he came under suspicion.

Two prisoners, both of whom had been transferred from Fort Leavenworth with a wealth of convictions behind them, tried to escape from the island on 16 November 1912. According to the report in the
San Francisco Call,
Thomas V. Frayne (or Frayney) had been court martialled thirteen times, Michael Mullins five, while between them they had been tried 234 times by executive officers. Although some accounts suggest that they disappeared successfully on a raft, a report in the
Call
on 20 November says that “[w]eakened in flesh and spirit by two deadly foes, hunger and thirst” both men had been recaptured three days later. After somehow getting out of the dungeon beneath the main corridor of the prison, they had hidden under a pile of driftwood, and had been able to file off their heavy ball-and-chains. What they hadn’t bargained on was being unable to find food or fresh water, and Mullins was found, covered with slime and nearly famished on 19 November.

Another pair disappeared from a work party on the island into the heavy fog in 1916, and stole a log each from the flotsam washed up on the Rock. One was initially believed to have drowned, but hid in a boathouse hoping to escape later; the other made it to safety on Little Alcatraz Rock, to the northwest of the mainland, but had to call for help from the prison. Two years later, a brace of cheeky inmates who had worked their way up to become trusties, and thus not watched so closely, managed to purloin guard officers’ uniforms, probably from the prison laundry, and simply boarded the ferry to the mainland. Their audacity wasn’t rewarded with liberty: they were arrested two days later at Modesto.

The same government tug, the
General McDowell,
was used by four conscientious objectors who tried to leave Alcatraz without permission in August 1919: they had managed to get hold of civilian clothing, but two of them were queried by the captain of the ferry, who wondered why they had wet trousers. He also asked for their passes, which they claimed they had been told they wouldn’t need. Although Captain Hornsman seemed to accept their explanations, he told the officer of the day on Angel Island that he had suspicious persons on board. All four were found and returned to Alcatraz.

“I believe the men attempted to escape in the belief they could secret (sic) themselves on board with the members of a visiting baseball team which came to the island on Sunday,” Colonel Joseph Garrard, the Commandant of the island told the
San Francisco Examiner.
“There is little possibility of men getting away from the island without proper credentials. Everyone coming and going is required to display a pass. Lack of this was responsible for the apprehension of these men.”

However, five years later a similar ruse worked for Edward Lay, Basil Mann and Roy Kennison. The trio apparently took overcoats and hats belonging to guests attending a reception on Alcatraz on 8 October 1924, and then simply mingled with them as they returned to San Francisco. There is no record of the men being returned to the island.

Planes assisted with the search for two escapees in 1927, but their plank-paddling exploits were brought to an end by the astute Captain K.V. Anderson of the
Redwood Empire
ferry, who additionally captured himself a $100 reward. Two men clinging to a ladder in 1929 only managed to get a few hundred yards from the Rock before the tides prevented them progressing. A trio of escapees a year later tried to sail across to Berkeley on large planks of wood, after prising the bars off the barber shop window, but they soon realized that their chances were slim, so yelled for help. They were located by the large searchlight on the island and brought back, one of them in a seriously exhausted condition.

The final recorded escape from the military prison took place on 23 June 1930. Jack (or Jasper) Allen simply stripped off, greased his body and dived into the bay, or at least, that was Colonel G. Maury Cralle, the Alcatraz commandant’s opinion. Since Allen’s corpse was never discovered, he may have been one of the few to make it off alive, but like the 1912 escapees, there was never any trace of him alive either.

According to an editorial in the
San Francisco Chronicle
in 1933, seventeen military prisoners escaped from the island either using boats or by swimming across the bay, and six fled by other means during the Rock’s seventy years as a military prison. As a percentage of the total number of prisoners incarcerated there during that time, it wasn’t that many, but it alarmed the good people of San Francisco who objected strongly to the Justice Department’s plans to house “desperate or irredeemable” types on the Rock.

Their protests were to no avail. Even attempts to prove how easy it was to escape were ignored – including the demonstration by Doris McLeod and Gloria Scigliano that it was perfectly possible to swim from the Rock to the shore safely. Security in the prison was tightened up considerably, with the new inmates confined to a much smaller part of the island than had been used by the military prisoners. Doors were placed across tunnels, new metal window guards were installed, and tool-proof gratings added around ventilation shafts. The Justice Department wanted Alcatraz to be escape-proof. Guards tried to saw through the bars, but could only make an impression on the softer outer metal – the inner core defeated them.

On 19 June 1934, the US Army officially departed from the Rock, leaving thirty-four prisoners behind; on 11 August, the first batch of new civilian prisoners arrived on Alcatraz. Of those fourteen, half had escaped from or been involved in attempts to escape from previous jails; nearly all were described by the Warden as “desperate” and quite a few, it was noted, would be prepared to kill in order to get away. Not one of them is listed in the successful escapes from Alcatraz that followed over the next thirty or so years. According to the Bureau of Prisons report on the first year of operations, “The establishment of this institution not only provided a secure place for the detention of the more difficult type of criminal but has had a good effect upon discipline in our other penitentiaries also. No serious disturbance of any kind has been reported during the year.”

It didn’t really surprise Alcatraz’s warden to learn that there were rumours of escape plans from the Rock right from the start. As he explained to his superiors, prisoners automatically checked their surroundings for weak spots. They came up with plans that would work if only they had a gun, or access to a speedboat or airplane. He refused to allow such rumours to give him the jitters.

The first acknowledged escape attempt from the Federal Penitentiary was carried out by Joseph “Joe” Bowers, who was one of the first prisoners transferred to Alcatraz, aged roughly thirty-seven, in September 1934. His crime: a post office robbery that netted the grand total of sixteen dollars and thirty-eight cents. His sentence: twenty-five years’ imprisonment.

Bowers claimed that he had been raised in a travelling circus, and had visited multiple countries acting as an interpreter as he spoke six languages. He had been arrested for transporting stolen vehicles across state lines in 1928, and driving while drunk two years later, before graduating to robbery in 1932. While imprisoned in the Washington state McNeil Island federal penitentiary, he was described as “unpredictable and at high risk resulting from being emotionally unstable”. His period at high-security prison Leavenworth was marked by violations of institution rules, a practice he continued when he was transferred to Alcatraz.

Within six months of arriving on the Rock, Joe Bowers tried to commit suicide, cutting his throat by breaking his spectacles and using a piece of glass to inflict a three-inch-long wound. The Alcatraz authorities didn’t take the attempt on 7 March 1935 seriously: the prison psychiatrist Edward W. Twitchell observed Bowers and reported to his superiors that “the recent attempts at suicide have been theatrically planned and have resulted in very little damage to him . . . Bower, while an abnormal individual, is not truly insane in my opinion and is pretending a mental disturbance for some purpose.”

A year passed, during which time Bowers failed to cope well with the tough regime at Alcatraz. Prisoners were only allowed to communicate with each other on rare occasions, and then usually only to the extent required (such as in the mess). For a man who claimed that he had made his living by speaking to others, it was a torment. In March 1936, he was assigned to the incinerator detail, one of the worst assignments on the Rock, sorting out metals and burning the prison waste. On 26 April 1936 Joe Bowers came to a premature end of his sentence when he was shot down by Junior Custodial Officer E. F. Chandler.

Some inmates thought that Bowers was trying to retrieve a piece of rubbish that had become lodged in the fence. Others said that he was trying to feed a seagull that he had spotted. There is a school of thought that he simply cracked and committed suicide. Whatever his motive, it is certain that at around 11 a.m. that morning, Bowers climbed the wire fence, and refused to listen to warnings from guard Chandler to get down. In his official report the next day, Chandler wrote:

He ignored my warning and continued to go over. I fired two shots low and waited a few seconds to see the results. He starded (sic) down the far side of the fence and I fired one more shot, aiming at his legs. Bowers was hanging on the fence with his hands but his feet were pointing down toward the cement ledge. After my third shot I called the Armory and reported the matter. When I returned from ’phoning the body dropped into the bay.

His report was corroborated by another junior guard, Neil S. Morrison, who said that he heard two shots and saw Bowers “bare-footed, with his pants rolled up, climbing up the fence with his back and part of his right side towards me. I ran along the fence toward the incinerator in hopes I could get there in time to stop him if he got stuck on his way over. There was one more shot before I got to the rock crusher . . . When I reached there, I saw his body on the rocks through the incinerator grating.”

Chandler was certain that Bowers’ actions were deliberate. “He knew what he was doing and I couldn’t go get him without wings,” he told a Coroner’s jury panel. Even if he didn’t mean to escape, though, Bowers’ last moments after being shot in the lungs, were spent sixty feet below the walls of Alcatraz – on the free side.

The first confirmed escape from the island came in December 1937, although its perpetrators, Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe, were never heard from again. Cole was serving a fifty-year term for kidnapping, Roe a ninety-nine-year sentence for armed robbery. The two men answered their names for the 1 p.m. count on 16 December, but had vanished by the next count half an hour later. They were working in the industrial buildings on the north-west side of the island, which posed some security problems for the authorities, since its waterside aspect couldn’t be seen by the guards in the watchtowers. The warden had made the Justice Department aware of this problem, but funds hadn’t been available to rectify the situation. Somehow Cole and Roe had broken two panes of glass on that side of the mat shop, then jimmied a lock on the wire fence surrounding the building.

There were few places for them to hide, particularly as it was high tide and the caves under the north-west end were flooded, so it was assumed that they must have made a swim for it – choosing a very picturesque way to commit suicide, according to Director of Prisons James V. Bennett. Alcatraz Warden James A. Johnston firmly believed that they tried swimming. As he explained to the
San Francisco Chronicle,
“Serving terms tantamount to life imprisonment, it is my belief they decided to take a desperate chance and that they had no outside aid. I believed they drowned and that their bodies were swept toward the Golden Gate by the strong ebb tide.” Despite this, a wave of hysteria flooded San Francisco with eventual sightings of the felons near Petaluma, in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and even South America. The San Francisco police warned the citizens that the two men might well try to carry out further robberies.