Read Online Escape from Alcatraz by J. Campbell Bruce - Free Book Online
Authors: J. Campbell Bruce
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That’s what I’m there for.
“Bowers was over the deadline. He knew what he was doing, and I couldn’t get him without wings.”
Bowers was at the top, picking his way over the barbed wire, when Chandler leveled Mary Ann and let him have it. A single bullet sped from the tower, on target. Bowers leaped convulsively, plunged to the rocks. The prison launch recovered the body. He had been shot through the lungs.
The general belief among the inmate population was that Bowers, growing stir simple and bent on ending it all, had taken this means to circumvent the canon against self-destruction.
John Stadig, counterfeiter isolated in a bug cage upstairs when he began acting a bit wacky, exhibited a gruesome cunning. A guard handed in lunch one day and then, instead of standing watch, let Stadig alone behind the locked, solid door. Stadig bent a prong of the fork and jabbed it in his wrist, worked it under the big vein and pried the vein out into the open. Then he bit it in two. He was prying the vein out of the other wrist when the guard returned for the luncheon tray. Besides his wrist, Stadig punctured a hole in the concept of Alcatraz as a super-lockup for troublemakers: too much of a trouble on The Rock, he was shipped back to Leavenworth. The day he arrived there, safely locked away in a cell, he broke a lens of his eyeglasses, took a jagged piece and sliced his jugular vein. He had at last found release.
One night in 1937 the San Francisco Chronicle, a morning paper, received a tip of an incident on the island and, unable to get verification, ran a vague account of “a prisoner, last name of Percival,” that read, in part: “A story of horror, almost unbelievable, came out of the prison fortress, Alcatraz, last night. It rivaled in grimness some of the tales of Poe and, although shrouded in a close veil of secrecy, it remained undenied … Warden Johnston would neither deny nor confirm the story.”
Washington conformed it the next day. The episode had occurred a month earlier. The convict who played the Poe protagonist was one Rufe Persful, Arkansas robber. He was working with the dock gang. He laid his left hand on a block and chopped off the fingers with a hatchet, one after the other, like a butcher cleaving chops off a pork loin. He then offered the hatchet to a gaping convict, laid his right hand on the block and said, “Chop them off, too!” The convict flung the hatchet aside and ran shouting to the guard.
A question naturally arises: How many other incidents of men driven to appalling self-mutilation by The Rock’s refined system of medieval torture have been successfully covered up?
For three years the grim rule of silence gave The Rock the strange aspect of a prison for the dumb, convicts untutored in sign language. Warden Johnston contended the rule was not so severe as it sounded, that the men could talk in the shops during a three-minute rest period in the morning and for three minutes in the afternoon; that, at meals, one might say, “Pass the sugar”; that they could chat in the yard on Sunday afternoons, except that the guards zealously kept the men separated to prevent the hatching of plots. In 1937 Johnston announced to the press he had rescinded the rule as a step in easing the rigidity of discipline. The action was commended as a humanitarian gesture.
Convicts who were there at the time offer another version. Johnston, dubbed Salt Water for a reputed practice of hosing down unruly inmates, had a habit of coming into the mess hall at lunchtime to sample the fare. He would then stand near the door as the prisoners filed out. The dining room had the subdued, almost sedate atmosphere of a gentlemen’s club, the polite requests for salt or pepper arising like the murmur of cultured conversation. Suddenly, above the murmurous quiet sounded a clear, strong talking voice, distinctly not saying, “Sugar, please?” The effect produced was that of a rattle of gunfire. The warden glanced in
“Bowers was over the deadline. He knew what he was doing, and I couldn’t get him without wings.”
Bowers was at the top, picking his way over the barbed wire, when Chandler leveled Mary Ann and let him have it. A single bullet sped from the tower, on target. Bowers leaped convulsively, plunged to the rocks. The prison launch recovered the body. He had been shot through the lungs.
The general belief among the inmate population was that Bowers, growing stir simple and bent on ending it all, had taken this means to circumvent the canon against self-destruction.
John Stadig, counterfeiter isolated in a bug cage upstairs when he began acting a bit wacky, exhibited a gruesome cunning. A guard handed in lunch one day and then, instead of standing watch, let Stadig alone behind the locked, solid door. Stadig bent a prong of the fork and jabbed it in his wrist, worked it under the big vein and pried the vein out into the open. Then he bit it in two. He was prying the vein out of the other wrist when the guard returned for the luncheon tray. Besides his wrist, Stadig punctured a hole in the concept of Alcatraz as a super-lockup for troublemakers: too much of a trouble on The Rock, he was shipped back to Leavenworth. The day he arrived there, safely locked away in a cell, he broke a lens of his eyeglasses, took a jagged piece and sliced his jugular vein. He had at last found release.
One night in 1937 the San Francisco Chronicle, a morning paper, received a tip of an incident on the island and, unable to get verification, ran a vague account of “a prisoner, last name of Percival,” that read, in part: “A story of horror, almost unbelievable, came out of the prison fortress, Alcatraz, last night. It rivaled in grimness some of the tales of Poe and, although shrouded in a close veil of secrecy, it remained undenied … Warden Johnston would neither deny nor confirm the story.”
Washington conformed it the next day. The episode had occurred a month earlier. The convict who played the Poe protagonist was one Rufe Persful, Arkansas robber. He was working with the dock gang. He laid his left hand on a block and chopped off the fingers with a hatchet, one after the other, like a butcher cleaving chops off a pork loin. He then offered the hatchet to a gaping convict, laid his right hand on the block and said, “Chop them off, too!” The convict flung the hatchet aside and ran shouting to the guard.
A question naturally arises: How many other incidents of men driven to appalling self-mutilation by The Rock’s refined system of medieval torture have been successfully covered up?
For three years the grim rule of silence gave The Rock the strange aspect of a prison for the dumb, convicts untutored in sign language. Warden Johnston contended the rule was not so severe as it sounded, that the men could talk in the shops during a three-minute rest period in the morning and for three minutes in the afternoon; that, at meals, one might say, “Pass the sugar”; that they could chat in the yard on Sunday afternoons, except that the guards zealously kept the men separated to prevent the hatching of plots. In 1937 Johnston announced to the press he had rescinded the rule as a step in easing the rigidity of discipline. The action was commended as a humanitarian gesture.
Convicts who were there at the time offer another version. Johnston, dubbed Salt Water for a reputed practice of hosing down unruly inmates, had a habit of coming into the mess hall at lunchtime to sample the fare. He would then stand near the door as the prisoners filed out. The dining room had the subdued, almost sedate atmosphere of a gentlemen’s club, the polite requests for salt or pepper arising like the murmur of cultured conversation. Suddenly, above the murmurous quiet sounded a clear, strong talking voice, distinctly not saying, “Sugar, please?” The effect produced was that of a rattle of gunfire. The warden glanced in
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