"Doc" on the Rock:
Ripples from the Fall
of Arthur Barker

Part Three

January 13, 1939(1)

From atop the Rock, the huge estuary misnamed the San Francisco Bay looked like nothing more dangerous than a rippled floor of the deepest emerald. A contrasting white line marked the waves as they slapped at the stoney shore and fell back, forming entrancing arabesques against half-submerged offshore rocks. A man could be fooled by this seascape. If you watched a while, the water could start to seem palpable enough to walk upon. Though this hypnosis would disappear, it was still easy to underestimate the Bay and forget that the surging tides of the Golden Gate were chilled by waters flowing from the Gulf of Alaska.

Doc and his gang saw the sea every day. Through the windows of the mat shop, they reckoned the distance to shore and told themselves they could make it. During an earlier stage of the planning, they'd counted on the recently released George Thompson (249-AZ), a San Francisco-based pusher, to wait offshore in a boat. Tight controls over communication with the outside made this plan infeasible and Barker now knew about the undertow which had made legends and dead men out of Cole and Roe. But he still misjudged the waters and made plans to swim them. In the conspirator's mind, crossing the strait that lay between Alcatraz and the shore was to be no more challenging than swimming across a warm Midwestern lake in July.

The main things, he'd decided by January 1938, were to keep the water out of his lungs and to keep out of sight of the guards. Being that it was necessary to have a safe place where he and his accomplices could work making the tools they needed for the break, Doc ruled the mat shop. He and his prison ring had driven out the convicts they didn't like and cowed the rest, including the foreman, a forger named Frank Gouker (156-AZ). They labored openly on turning a dust mask into an underwater breathing mask using rubber tubing and the slim metal tubing used to crimp together the ends of wires as the air line. An inner tube, which had come in with the tires the men cut into door mats, served as stock for a pair of water wings. Brazenly, Doc and Franklin had demanded glue of the frightened Gouker while they openly discussed the shape of the float.

Though Gouker feared standing up to Barker, he was not so submitting as to keep the secret of the break from prison authorities. One day he decided to write to the Warden. He flagged down the orderly and asked for some paper. The orderly gave him the standard allotment: five sheets and a pencil. Alcatraz regulations stipulated that he return whatever he didn't use to the orderly who kept the extra sheets expressly for him until the next time the prisoner needed writing materials. Over the last few years, Gouker had written to Johnston many times, mostly about his parole and the destitute condition of his wife and partner in crime, Anna. This time, he hoped he had the makings of a deal.

Gouker hadn't meant to get Anna in trouble. When the postal inspectors caught him, he agreed to tell them everything in exchange for their allowing his wife to go free. The defendant was too poor to afford a lawyer, however, so it was easy for the district attorney to ignore the pact and use the confession to put Anna as well as Frank in prison. Gouker regretted getting his wife incarcerated and often appealed to Johnston for assistance in freeing her. As his sentence dragged on, he became more frantic in his appeals and the authorities reciprocated by becoming more obdurant. In 1937, Dr. Charles Whelan, a M.D. who made the rounds of federal prisons interviewing candidates for parole, belittled Gouker's potential for reform: "Once a forger, always a forger" he had his recorder enter into the hearing transcript.(2)

Such rejections of his sincere requests for intercessions probably led Gouker to believe that he needed something big to convince Johnston that he deserved help. In his letter, he told all: he described the masks and the air line. He named Barker and his coconspirators who included Alvin Karpis and Joe Clark up in the tailor shop. He wrote about the threats they'd made. And he discussed the conspiratorial dynamic which united the white and the black convicts as partners in the escape. Barker's agent Rufus McCain enlisted the black inmates' support by "ribbing" or making them think they were "big men". Gouker and his best friend in the shop, a black post office robber named Willie Gill (157-AZ), spent their working hours watching over their shoulders lest Barker order their murder or William "Ty" Martin, a massive black bank robber out of Chicago, sneak up behind them and slap their heads. Martin was just one of the Missouri-born kidnapper's many enforcers.

Barker's plan was to get his allies to start trouble in the laundry, forcing Johnston to reassign some guards there. With the industries watch weakened, the plotters would then produce shivs and a hatchet to menace Mr. Steere and Mr. Bright into surrender. If they resisted, Gouker insisted, Barker and his gang had no compunctions against killing them. Gouker expected that they would also seize the moment to slay Gill and him. (Both had scabbed during the 1937 strike.) Once they'd dealt with the guards and the strikebreakers, the intriguers would move to the sea. Gouker wrote:

Those men figure on having masks so they can breathe under water, but the colored boys will be left without any and will have to hit the top of the water. I don't think the colored boys know that the other fellows have something to go under water with. I think they have been told that there will be a boat to pick them up.(3)

In February, 1938, the Bureau of Prisons called for bids to install tool-proof bars along the seaward side of the mat shop. Future escape attempts could not be as shameless as that of Cole and Roe: no one could just climb out the window. Franklin, who'd been transferred upstairs to the wood shop, invented a plan to go out over the roof. Together with Thomas Limmerik (263-AZ) and James Lucas (335-AZ)(4), Franklin left his work station, sneaked up behind Officer Royal Cline, and smashed in the back of the guard's head with a claw hammer.(5) Next, they climbed to the roof and stormed the guard tower, the door of which was usually left open so that the guard didn't cook under the sun. Today, though, a replacement guard named Stites manned the post. And he'd locked the door. Limmerik, Franklin, and Lucas started pelting the windows of the booth with bits of iron and other heavy objects. Stites drew his .45 and shot Limmerik dead. Franklin, who was trying to sneak up on Stites from another angle, took the next bullet and fell into the mass of barbed wire which encircled the roof's perimeter. As another guard showed up, the uninjured and shaken Lucas gave up.

Franklin's failure proved the futility of an escape from the Model Industries Building, so the gang rethought its plans. Installation work around the mat shop gave them a rare opportunity to examine the tool-proof bars in cross-section and consider how they might be broken. Sometime in 1938, Barker approached his old friend and partner Alvin Karpis bearing a new idea: they would wait for a heavy fog and a dark night, make the break from the maximum security D-Block, and paddle to shore on driftwood rafts.

The audacious plan impressed Karpis except for the way it addressed the problem of getting off the Rock. Years later, Public Enemy Number One told his collaborator of his dread of the hidden currents off Alcatraz which had drowned Cole and Roe. He asked Doc if he could think about the plan. Doc gave him the time.

Karpis came back a few weeks later. He proposed that they overpower the road tower and catwalk guards once they were out of the building; steal their uniforms and guns; slip over to the family compound; and take the Warden and his wife hostage. Then they'd lure the island's doctor to the house and order him to direct that the launch be made ready for an emergency run to the mainland. (He was to say that Mrs. Johnston had ruptured her appendix.) The escapees would board the launch with their hostages, certain to enjoy the freedom to command its destination once it left the dock.

Doc rejected the idea as too complicated, so Karpis dropped out of the plot.

The new scheme required that the inmates work the system that Johnston had devised to thwart jailbreaks. Henri Young (244-AZ) had a substantial record against himself for things like "agitating", yelling at the top of his lungs, joining in strikes, laughing, disobeying orders, deliberately knocking over a vegetable bin, wasting food, and wanting seconds while in isolation. He had only to remain where he was. Dale Stamphill feigned a fight with his prison lover. Into D-Block he went. Rufus McCain let himself be caught with contraband. When he and Stamphill got put into isolation, they found Ty Martin waiting for them. (Martin had probably slapped Gouker or Gill one too many times and been seen by a guard.)

The pregnability of Alcatraz's maximum security unit was legend: prisoners regularly let themselves out of the relic Army-era cells to take moonlight strolls beneath the window gratings. On October 17, 1938, the same day that Associate Warden E.J. Miller took him out of solitary and placed him on a two full meal a day diet (with bread and water for the third) in Isolation, Young took the hacksaw blade which had been passed to him and started cutting the bars of his cell. Five days of this work let him bend the bars like scissors and enter and leave his cell as it pleased him.

Barker worked his ticket into D-Block by jumping Ira Blackwood (180-AZ) out in the recreation yard. The date was October 30, 1938. Blackwood, who was serving his time for mugging a postmaster, didn't know why Barker had punched him. The two brawlers got the hole for the misadventure. Blackwood came out in two days and was released from D-Block with full privileges by the end of November, but Doc, who'd earned the animosity of Acting Deputy Warden C.J. Shuttleworth (who was filling in while E.J. Miller took a month-long vacation), remained in isolation. It was where he wanted to be.

The gang set to work preparing their cells and the bay-side windows of D-Block for the break. Convicts knew that the magnetic sensors of the "electronic snitches" that they passed through to and from the industries did not go all the way to the ground. If a prisoner shuffled as he walked through the checkpoint, he could smuggle a bit of wire, a nail, a drill-bit, a hacksaw blade, or a crudely fashioned shiv into the cell house. Once brought in to B or C Block, the contraband travelled from inmate to inmate until it arrived in the hands of the D-Block internee who'd ordered it.(6)

Hacksaw blades could not, however, cut the tool-resisting steel of the window guards. Going through the outer layer was easy enough, but once the blade hit the core (as Henri Young explained to Examiner reporter Alfred D. Hyman) "it was just like drawing a fingernail over a piece of glass." To break the bars, the Barker gang invented a small pressure jack, the parts for which "Slim" Bartlett (239-AZ) obligingly smuggled in by secreting them inside a shop-made steel guitar he'd got permission to bring through the metal detector.(7) Young described the mechanism during a lull in his 1941 murder trial:

They were of metal, some three inches long; inside the metal was a five-eighths inch threaded screw. This could be turned with a wrench, to spread the jack, until it was five and one half-inches long. The ends of the wrench were concave, to fit the bars.

We would put the jack in place between the bars, and extend it to its limit, and then move it over to the other side, and bend the bar back again. Three repetitions of this process were enough to break the tool proof core, in much the same manner that a piece of wire can be broken by repeated bending back and forth.(8)

Daytime, when the penitentiary was bustling in fulfillment of the Daily Routine, proved to be the best time for snapping the bars. At night, the prison stilled until the creaking of a cot could be heard anywhere in the Cell House. While the guards busied themselves with counts, lining up prisoners for meals or work, watching them eat, and exchanging reports, Young, McCain, and Martin sneaked from their ground-floor cells and worked on the bars. While McCain and Martin operated the jack, Young climbed onto the roof of the upper tier of D-Block and watched the gun cage which ran in a commanding view of the prison's four aisles. (When he first took this position, Young realized that he'd taken a terrible chance in spreading the bars of his cell without a lookout: he'd have been easy pickings for the gun-cage guard who could have shown up at any time and shot him on sight.) Any noises that they made were covered by footsteps, sliding doors, barked commands, flushing toilets, and other diurnal prison noises. The escapees filled the cuts they made with putty and then painted the patches with aluminum paint which matched the colors of the bars. When the routine required them to rest in closely observed idleness, the inmates hid their tools in an unused cell.

It took them longer than they had expected to break the bars. But when Friday, January 13, 1939 brought them a thick fog, they were ready for their clandestine run to the sea.

That dark morning, five felons grabbed the sheets off their cots, let themselves out of their cells, crossed the aisle separating D-Block from the windows, and spread open the prepared bars. Martin, who was the biggest of the lot, went through first. He got stuck. Stamphill climbed up the window cage and shoved Martin's head through with his foot. Seeing that the way was passable to all, Doc and the others followed.

They found themselves on a catwalk near the road tower. A momentary paralysis fled them as they realized that the fog concealed them from the sleepy eyes of the guard. They climbed down the hill, picking up scrap lumber as they went. A steep cliff plunged downwards from the foot of the road tower. At the base of the scarp, the escapees found an unnatural little beach with chunks of sandstone that had been pushed off Alcatraz's slopes by Army convicts a generation earlier. As they neared the tide line, the men felt the Bay's coldness for the first time.

The waters which had seemed so smooth, so placid from the bluffs, now wildly rushed in and seized the fugitives' shins with frothy fingers. The Bay's chilly touch gave the escapers more than a few second thoughts about the means they'd chosen for getting off the island. Barker and his cohorts prepared to swim it anyways. They'd come this far and they knew that any escape plan was good only once. There was plenty of driftwood on the beach, so they gathered some and lashed it to the lumber they'd found with the sheets they'd brought from the Cell House. The convicts stripped, bundled up their clothes, and laid them atop their rafts. Then they pushed off. Fifty yards out, McCain told the others that he couldn't swim. The inmates went back, gathered more driftwood, added it to the mass of the raft, and set off again. This time they got twice as far as they had on the first attempt. Again, the coldness and the pull of the undertow caused McCain to beg his companions to return. They did. This time the lapping of the waves, the wind, and the bellow of the foghorn prevented them from hearing that the Cell House siren had started to sound.

The klaxon's call jarred Warden Johnston out of a sound sleep. He groped for the ringing indepartmental telephone on the nightstand next to his bed and put it to his ear. The caller told him that five men had broken from their cells. Johnston blinked and looked at his alarm clock. It was 4:00 a.m. All over the Rock, sirens screeched and every few seconds, the deep boom of the foghorn joined them. The Warden threw on the clothes he'd been wearing the night before (he'd wrapped things up at around midnight on the 12th) and rushed out to get the news.

The whole island was awake. Guards rushed out of their houses, still buttoning their shirt collars as they rushed to report for duty. Joyce Ritz and her mother sneaked out for a peek at the light and sound show, which illuminated every corner of the prison complex and echoed off every wall. Officer Edgar Padgett heard the siren while he walked his patrol. He found a telephone, called the Control Center, and learned about the break. Alone in his sector, Padgett found himself staring out into murky darkness and fingering his automatic. Instead of giving him comfort, the gun struck him as nothing more than a toy. In the Cell House, the prisoners had got wind of the escape and were yelling derisively at the staff about the tool-proof bars and the alertness of the guards.

There'd been three guards on Cell House duty that night: one in each gun-cage and a third walking the floor. At 3 a.m., the floor officer had counted all the cells and found everyone in his cell. He began a second, informal count at 3:30 a.m. It took him until 3:45 a.m. to get to D-Block. There he found a cell deserted, its soft bars twisted open. He turned, ran to a telephone, and called Lieutenant Weinhold. Weinhold rushed over from Administration and made a new count with the flabbergasted guard. Five men from the maximum security area were missing. Weinhold sounded the alarm.

Associate Warden E.J. Miller was organizing the search when Johnston ran up. At 4:14 a.m., Police Inspector Leo O'Connor got a call from the island alerting him to the break. "I could hear that siren screaming through the telephone," he told a San Francisco News Reporter. O'Connor ordered police cars to the waterfront and despatched the police launch, D.A. White, to search the waters off the island. At the Presidio, a dozen soldiers took positions along Crissy Field and Fort Point where the swimmers were most likely to land.(9) A Coast Guard cutter rushed to the west of the island and illuminated the shores with her searchlights. Miller and Johnston armed their men. Several officers were sent to guard a lumber pile sitting on the parade ground. The prison launch began to circle the island. Johnston feared that the prisoners might try to take hostages, so he led a third party down to the residential area, paying particular attention to his own basement and that of the island's physician, Dr. Ritchey.(10)

One of these hunters found someone climbing through the window of a guard's apartment. "Hold it!" he cried. As he raised his rifle, a woman cried out "Don't shoot!" Joyce Ritz's mother ran up to the guard. The feet dangling out the window belonged to Joyce, the daughter of another guard. They'd gone out to see the ships playing their lights on the water and locked themselves out.

The prison launch was rounding the southeast end of Alcatraz and shining its lights along the rocky shoreline. At the same time, the officer in the road tower moved his spot back and forth over the clouds suspended over the rocky beach. Johnston remembered that the officers on the road heard either a voice or the clatter of footsteps over the chunky beach. They ordered whoever was down there to halt. The road tower light picked up two figures who ran out of it and into the darkness. As the guards opened fire, the road tower officer continued to play his spot over the beach and picked up two more men. Young and McCain threw up their hands immediately.

The problem with this story is that the Coroner's jury convened to rule on Barker's death two weeks later chided the prison for not having search lights powerful enough to penetrate the fog. Henry Young and Dale Stamphill both remembered the lights coming from the patrol boat offshore. As in Johnston's account, Young and McCain gave up as soon as the light hit them. Barker and Stamphill ran.

The guards on the Rock and in the patrol boat opened fire. At least three versions of what happened have come down to us, two of them attributed to Dale Stamphill. Johnston reported that the guards on the road ordered them to stop, laid down a line of warning shots along the surf line, and then opened fire with their rifles and submachine guns when the pair did not stop. Babyak says that Stamphill related that he and Barker hid behind a large rock. Bullets ricocheted all around them. Doc looked up to see what was happening and got a slug in his forehead. He slumped down, looked at his friend, warned him not to look up, and then lapsed into a babbling half-comatose state. Karpis claims that Stamphill told him that they'd been shot from the prison launch. According to this version, Doc and Stamphill had been putting the raft together while their three companions searched for more boards. "What with the waves and the wind and them fog horns howling," Stamphill is purported to have said, "there was just no way we could hear the goddam siren go off." When the search beam found them, Doc and Stamphill reacted by running out of the light. The officers in the boat opened fire and shot their legs out from under them. Then, if the Stamphill/Karpis story is correct, Associate Warden Miller landed from the boat, pointed to Doc, and said "If that son of a bitch even moves an inch, shoot him in the head!" Doc groaned and moved to ease the pain in his legs. For this, Karpis believed, the guards shot him.(11)

All accounts agree that Doc had been hit in the leg and the head. The officers from the launch loaded the wounded Barker and Stamphill aboard and brought them back to the dock. Another set of guards marched the naked Young and McCain up to the infirmary where Dr. Ritchey checked them for exposure before sending them back into isolation. Martin remained at large. According to Babyak, Miller was not in the boat at the time of Barker's shooting, but was searching the south end of the island with Officer Faulk. They had just waded into the water when they heard something fall down the cliff behind them. Miller and Faulk turned to see the Martin sprawled among the rocks from the fall he'd just taken. The bank robber was wearing only his socks, which had turned red from the fresh cuts on his legs and feet. He willingly surrendered.(12) At 5:38 a.m., Johnston told the San Francisco police that he no longer needed their help.

The Barker legend was not yet at an end. Barker's life struggle lasted for several hours. Johnston related that a remorseful Barker said only that he'd been "a fool to try it. I'm shot all to hell." Karpis wrote that when the doctors tried to help him, Barker committed suicide by angrilly pulling the blood transfusions from his arm.

The memo which Dr. Romney M. Ritchey wrote to the Warden told a different story of Barker's passing. When the guards brought him into the hospital, Barker babbled about the pain in his left leg and the cold. He became silent, but restless, sitting up to look around him. Ritchey called in Dr. E.M. Townsend of the U.S. Marine Hospital as a consultant. As Barker rolled about in his bed, Ritchey and Townsend checked his vital signs and performed a spinal puncture. His blood pressure dropped and he wheezed agonizingly. His spinal fluid held a large amount of blood which told the doctors that he'd sustained a skull fracture from the shot which hit him near his right eye. This and the loss of blood from the thigh wound conspired to kill Doc Barker. At 5:30 p.m., his condition suddenly worsened. Despite the administration of stimulants, Barker died at 5:40 p.m. on the afternoon of the escape attempt.(13)

This time, there could be no legends, no hopes that the escape had succeeded. The guards had Doc in custody; by night, they had his body to display as a trophy. By dawn, everyone in the prison knew that Barker had failed and word had also gone out to the mainland. The San Francisco papers called him "A Mama's Boy". The Call printed the telegram which Johnston had sent telling the world about the breakout.

On Alcatraz, work went on as usual except for one man. The door to Karpis's cell remained locked. The Protestant Chaplin and Librarian, Wayne Hunter, paid him a little visit to probe Public Enemy Number One's feelings about the failed escape. Hunter observed that Barker and his accomplices had had no guns. Did Karpis feel that they'd been shot deliberately?

"Of course they were deliberately shot!" [Karpis roared.] "So what? What of it? Anytime I stick my head out of these windows or anywhere it ain't supposed to be, I expect to be shot by you people."(14)

It was absurdly obvious to Karpis: At Alcatraz, each convict's life was forfeit at the whim of the guards. The minister, just like the warden, the guards and the foremen, was just one of the staff, one of the people whose job it was to keep him where he was or kill him if he tried to leave. Karpis was glad that Doc had died because he had no family other than Lloyd and George and, if he'd lived, he would have to do so with the disappointment that he'd failed to get off the Rock. For Karpis, the only thing left at the death of this man he'd called a brother was to live on, just to spite J. Edgar Hoover and the men who ran Alcatraz.