Alcatraz (33 page)

Warden Johnston—in San Francisco acting as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral of the former chief of police—was called and informed that there had been trouble on the island; shots had been fired, and an officer had been injured. He ordered the prison launch sent back to San Francisco to bring him back to the island.

Limerick never regained consciousness and died that evening. Officer Cline was transported to the U.S. Marine Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco, where his condition deteriorated. He died the next afternoon.

At first the violent breakout attempt by Limerick, Lucas, and Franklin attracted only moderate press attention, even though one inmate had been killed and another seriously injured, and an officer had died in the line of duty. The decision to try the surviving prisoners in federal district court, however, brought the incident to the headlines of Bay Area newspapers and produced what was called “the trial of the year.”

The press was particularly excited about the prospect of learning directly about life on the Rock from the two convicts on trial and from six others who had been present in the model building at the time of the escape and were listed as government witnesses. When the Alcatraz cons to be called as witnesses were identified to the press, the greatest interest focused on Harvey Bailey, whom a reporter labeled “the most dangerous convict at Alcatraz.” The question was whether Bailey would “rat on fellow convicts, cast suspicion on himself, or defy the federal court by refusing to testify.”
¹²
He was reported to have warned government prosecutors that he would be a poor witness because “he’s spending the rest of his life here and he has to live with these people. He didn’t see anything and doesn’t know anything. Number 139 is not talking.”
¹³

The local dailies also saw the trial as an excellent opportunity to satisfy the public’s desire for the lurid details of courtroom testimony. Even the process of selecting jurors was written up in dramatic imagery as the widow of the slain guard took a seat in the courtroom:

There’s a place reserved for a woman, with a red dress and a red hat and a granite face and eyes that stare bitterly at Lucas and Franklin. She’s Mrs. Royal C. Cline—widow of the Alcatraz guard who fell with bashed head under the hammers of his assailants on the day of the break attempt. Cline died a few hours later; he never recovered consciousness to say goodbye to his wife. She remembers that.
¹⁴

Before the trial actually began, Lucas’s attorney made an effort to stop the proceedings on the ground that his client had “gone mad,” but after a court-appointed psychiatrist concluded that Lucas was malingering and “scared speechless,” not insane, the judge rejected the motion.
¹⁵

The question for the jury was not whether the two men had tried to escape—that they admitted; it was whether they had killed Cline. Franklin and Lucas claimed that other convicts in the shop had committed the murder because they did not like Cline.
¹⁶

The trial began with the prosecution handing over for the inspection of the jurors close-up photographs of the battered head of Officer Cline and a white plastic death mask that had been formed by pouring a hot gelatinous substance over the dead guard’s face. Mrs. Cline covered her eyes. The trial produced sensational reports of the “gruesome” death mask, the “ghastly” photographs, and the “death hammer.” One story described the courtroom scene:

Rows of spectators—and for the first time, most of them are women—shudder in delighted thrill as [Officer Harold] Stites tells of sending his bullet through a convict’s skull, through another convict’s back.
¹⁷

Enhancing the
San Francisco Examiner
accounts of the trial was the commentary of former Alcatraz inmate P. F. Reed, who had been released several weeks earlier; Reed’s remarks ran under the headline “Alcatraz Is Hell.” Ex-Rock convict Roy Gardner showed up to watch the proceedings, and as author of a book entitled
Hellcatraz
, he pronounced Reed’s characterization of the Rock accurate. Thus, behind the question of who committed the murder of Officer Cline was the debate over whether the long criminal records of Lucas and Franklin provided the explanation for their violent acts or whether the “grim discipline” of the prison provoked convicts’ violence.

The two attorneys for Lucas and Franklin were unpaid and court appointed, but they mounted an aggressive defense to keep their clients out of the gas chamber. They attacked the government’s case on the grounds that only circumstantial evidence tied their clients to the murder. They
also sought to impugn the testimony of guard witnesses, drawing them into discussions of incidents of alleged brutality on the island.

In an effort to demonstrate that guard Otis Culver had “a motive to testify falsely against these defendants,” attorney Faulkner made the following claim:

I’ll prove that in January of 1936, a convict named Jack Allen was yelling and screaming in his cell; that Culver slugged him to stop him. Despite the slugging, Allen continued to scream and yell. Then Allen was removed to solitary confinement, and died the next morning. . . . The next day, the convicts called a strike, in which Defendant James Lucas participated. Lucas was slugged by Culver or by another guard in Culver’s presence; then he was kicked down an iron stairway, and the next day, had to be taken to the hospital.

According to the account in the
Examiner
, Faulkner’s line of questioning went like this:

By permitting this kind of questioning over the objections of U.S. Attorney Frank Hennessy, the judge enabled a defense strategy that put the staff on the defensive as they were interrogated about various incidents on the island in an effort to claim that a reign of terror existed on Alcatraz,
that the prison was so brutal that it forced inmates into suicide, madness, and murder.

As the trial proceeded, the government produced only one inmate witness, a man already transferred to another prison, who testified that he saw Limerick, Lucas, and Franklin in the room shortly before Cline was killed, but the sensational testimony that had been expected did not materialize—the Alcatraz convicts weren’t talking.

James Lucas and Whitey Franklin were convicted of the murder of Royal Cline, but the jury angered the Alcatraz staff by refusing to send them to the gas chamber. Franklin received another life sentence to go with the two already lodged against him and Lucas’s new life sentence was added to his existing thirty-year term. The Alcatraz staff, having interpreted these sentences as constituting no additional punishment for convicts who had murdered one of their number, were determined to find their own means of administering justice on the island. Lucas and Franklin anticipated this reaction when they told reporters after they had been sentenced that they expected to spend “the rest of their lives” in isolation, which meant “continuous imprisonment in unlighted cells on one meal a day.”
¹⁹
They were returned to Alcatraz and placed in D block. Lucas would remain there for the next six years; Franklin would not be released from disciplinary segregation until 1952—fourteen years later.

The trial demonstrated to Warden Johnston and Deputy Warden Miller that in any trial of Alcatraz prisoners, defense attorneys would seek to point the finger of ultimate culpability at the institution and its administration instead of the defendants. The experience discouraged them from prosecuting prisoners; instead, the prison would employ its own punitive measures, mainly taking away years of good time and locking inmates up in disciplinary segregation for months or years—decisions that required no due process proceeding or public scrutiny. The trial showed prisoners, however, that the press and Bay Area citizens were inclined to accept the argument that the prison was a genuine American version of Devil’s Island. The government never responded to such allegations other than denying their accuracy—and future juries would be inclined to believe inmate claims that the regime on the Rock drove them to acts of violence.

Attacking the armed guards on the roof of the model building was a desperate and very dangerous way of engineering an escape and, because it involved little ingenuity, had almost no hope of success. Only seven
months after the attempt by Limerick, Franklin, and Lucas, five inmates devised a more clever and stealthy mode of escape. They succeeded in breaking through every level of the Alcatraz security system—they got out of their cells, out of the cell house, past the gun towers, and confronted San Francisco Bay as the final barrier to freedom.

Dale Stamphill, one of the leaders of the breakout, was well acquainted with prisons and how to get out of them. Sentenced on auto theft charges to the Oklahoma State Reformatory, Stamphill had whittled himself a wooden gun in an attempt to replicate John Dillinger’s escape from jail at Crown Point, Indiana. He pointed his homemade gun at the guard in a tower, and the surprised man threw down his rifle—but not into the prison yard—and dove to the floor of the tower, where he set off the escape alarm that foiled Stamphill’s plan. In solitary, Stamphill heard a commotion one day and to his surprise the door to his cell opened and an inmate poked his head in and said, “Come on, we’re breaking out.” Stamphill joined a group of some thirty convicts who, with several smuggled guns, took over the administration building and grabbed hostages from its visiting room. On their way out of the building, Stamphill and several escapees took the keys to the chief clerk’s automobile, parked in front of the prison. Then they herded the hostages toward the main gate. The officer at the gate was armed with a shotgun but handed it over to Stamphill when he saw the crowd of hostages. One other obstacle, the front tower, remained. The tower guard was warned to throw down his gun but—with many inmates shouting instructions at the same time—he hesitated. Shots rang out from the ground below, the visitors scattered, screaming, and the guard fell, mortally wounded.

While the other inmates and all the visitors ran in many directions, Stamphill and seven other men raced to the vehicle, crowded in, and sped away from the prison. As they came to small towns, the escapees dropped off in groups of two or three. Stamphill and two men got out at the town of Seiling, where they promptly robbed the First National Bank, grabbed a local physician whose automobile was handy, and drove from Oklahoma to Texas. The bank robbery and kidnapping put federal agents on their trail, along with state and local police; the three were soon caught and returned to Oklahoma where they were tried, found guilty, and given life sentences for killing the prison guard.

Stamphill was sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester and locked up in the disciplinary unit, where he remained for almost two years. After his release into the general population, he fell into a conversation with several older convicts in the yard, and one, a lifer named
Brown, told him, “I don’t know your business but as someone who’s done a lot of time, if you plan to escape, do it the first chance you get. Don’t wait because you’ll get institutionalized and you won’t have the guts to do it.”
²⁰

This advice registered with Stamphill, but it was not until he had been taken to federal court, convicted of kidnapping the doctor, and transferred to Leavenworth with another life sentence that he began to seriously consider Brown’s advice. The guards in the disciplinary segregation unit there warned him, “We’re going to send you to Alcatraz; you’re not going to escape from us.” Eighty days passed while the staff accumulated enough convicts to fill a railroad car for shipment to the Rock. While he was waiting, a guard allowed him to see a newspaper editorial that commented on Cole and Roe’s escape attempt—and its apparent ending in the icy waters of the bay. The guard probably thought the editorial would send the message that it was futile to try to escape from Alcatraz. But the article made a different impression on Stamphill: “
They got out
. So, I started thinking toward escape.”

Stamphill arrived at Alcatraz in December 1937, with escape foremost in his mind. He talked to prisoners who had been on the island for several years and learned about using a bar spreader. The idea intrigued him. “I looked at those curved bars over the windows in the dining room and thought, God damn, that’s simple,” Stamphill recalled years later. “I knew that D block was a weak place. The cells had flat metal bars just like A block. And it was used as a punishment unit.” As the basic idea of a breakout plan formed in his mind, Stamphill sought out another convict he had known in the Oklahoma reformatory, a man who had a reputation for taking chances—Dock Barker. In Barker, Stamphill found someone already thinking about breaking out who was well connected with other convicts. Both men concluded that if their friend Ted Cole had escaped, “Hell, we can, too.”