"Doc" on the Rock:
Ripples from the Fall
of Arthur Barker
Part Four
Cosmos Plot #1528
The General McDowell pulled away from the Alcatraz dock, bearing its deceased cargo for examination by the City and County Coroner. The wake of the hearse ship would be the least of the ripples from Barker's death. Like the waves tearing particles of sand and stone from Alcatraz's shoreline, the events of the coming years would have an unpredictable effect on the shape of things at the Rock. Things would change, but the fact of the Rock itself would remain.
Reporters waiting on the dock were quick to intimate friction between Coroner T.B.W. Leland and Alcatraz officials over the deposition of Doc's body. Leland received the corpse on the 14th and performed the autopsy required in all cases of homicide, finding bullet holes next to Barker's right eye and in his thigh. Prison staff, it seems, wanted a quick burial. Perhaps they remembered the thousands who lined up to see Ma and Fred in both Florida and Missouri. Maybe they had heard about the little plot in which George had buried Ma, Fred, and Herman and feared that it would become a shrine. Leland resisted expediting the burial. Before he turned the remains over to Lasswell Mortuary, which held the contract for Alcatraz burials, he sent a telegram to George, asking him what he wanted to do. The coroner would not allow prison officials to merely dump the felon's cadaver into a pauper's grave. His family would have a say.(1)
Barker's feat had given the BOP much to worry about. The implications of the breakout were so disturbing that Director James A. Bennett cancelled all his Washington appointments and flew to California to take charge of the investigation. In thirty minutes' time, Barker and his accomplices had seemingly sawn through the bars of their isolation block cells and then cut through the tool-proof bars covering the windows. Just how had they done it? And where were their tools?
The whole prison was turned over. Prisoners were questioned and strip-searched. Guards used metal detectors to search the cells for the missing saw blades. When they did not find them, the most hopeful among them speculated that they'd been lost in the Bay; pessimists feared that they were still in the Cell House (which, in point of fact, they were). Experts studied the tool-proof window bars and concluded that they'd not been cut but snapped. The means of breaking the bars remained unknown, however, and officials could learn nothing about the tool which had been used to perform the miracle.
Bennett announced that the situation was under control and went back to Washington. The exhausted Johnston rested himself and delegated the task of testifying before the Coroner's jury to Associate Warden E.J. Miller.
Coroner Leland forced Miller to confess to many short-comings in Alcatraz operations. Miller said that he wasn't certain if the guards had been awake or asleep, though he quickly pointed out that they were expected to call in every thirty minutes. The metal detectors, he explained, worked only 60 percent of the time. They hadn't found the saw blades nor the instrument used to force the bars, which Miller believed had to be larger than a crowbar. Finally he admitted that the Rock's much vaunted impregnability depended largely on the cold water surrounding it.
United States Attorney Frank Hennessy tried to proof the prison against criticism for its lax security by asking that Barker's prison record be introduced into evidence. The Examiner reported that Barker's transfer order indicated that he'd been sent to Alcatraz to break up a prison gang.(2) Hennessey's move did little to distract the jury or Leland from speaking critically of the Federal Government. The jury's verdict was:
We, the jury, find that the said Arthur R. Barker met his death attempting to escape from Alcatraz Prison by gunshot wounds inflicted by guards unknown.
From the evidence at hand, we the jury, believe that this escape was made possible by the failure of the system for guarding prisoners now in use at Alcatraz Prison, and we recommend a drastic improvement by those in authority.
Further, that a more efficient system be adopted for illumination of shore and waters immediately surrounding the prison; and that the citizens of San Francisco unite in an effort to have a more suitable location chosen for imprisonment of the type of desparadoes at present housed at Alcatraz.(3)
Coroner Leland added his own pithy statement: "We don't like it and we don't want it. The citizens of San Francisco resent Alcatraz, and criminals of that type should be placed elsewhere." (4)
As Miller and Johnston endured the taunts of San Francisco's citizenry and municipal officials, Director Bennett compiled his findings for Attorney General Frank Murphy. Bennett answered San Franciscan concerns about security on the Rock by proposing to increase the number of guards and by overhauling D-Block so that its units were more rather than less secure than the cells in the rest of the prison.
The plan was effected, but Murphy introduced doubts about the penitentiary's future when he visited Alcatraz in May 1939. He found the prisoners anxious. He blamed their "stir-craziness" on conditions in the prison, particularly its lack of a prison farm. In a press conference, Murphy said:
It is a great injustice to San Francisco to have that place of horror on the doorstep of the city....The whole institution is conducive to psychology that builds up a sinister and vicious attitude among prisoners. [But he added:] "It won't be changed until something better in the public interest is arranged."(5)
Civic leaders, including Mayor Angelo Rossi, Coroner Leland, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the District Attorney and others, praised Murphy's stand. Strangely, Murphy did not blame prison officials for Alcatraz's poor human conditions. The low morale of the convicts that he reported somehow had to do more with the Rock's location, its lack of fertile soil, and the construction of the Cell House than it did with Warden Johnston's penal ideas or the guards' treatment of their thralls. He believed that the country needed a place where it could send "a crowd that conspires to escape or kill or murder." Murphy was indefinite about when San Franciscans could see the prison moved to a more isolated place. He gave no order to stop the million dollar refurbishment of D-Block and gave no date when the prison would be closed. The relic D-Block cells were completely ripped out and replaced with a more compact structure which left C-Block facing a blank wall. The new maximum security unit was completely shut off from the rest of the prison. No longer could inmates easilly pass contraband to those incarcerated in D-Block. Its more compact size and increased fortification made it easier for D-Block's guards to monitor the men who'd had the audacity or the misfortune to challenge the ways of Warden Johnston's island.
Among these was Henri Young, Barker's partner, who'd often provoked the ire of Alcatraz staff before he'd joined in the attempt. Young had had a falling out with Rufus McCain, presumably because of the latter's panic as they'd cast off the Rock. They first clashed on August 29, 1939. McCain was serving Young his food through the cell door. Young attempted to stab McCain. Guard Joe Steere slammed the door shut before Young could hurt McCain and Young, according to Steere, flushed his shiv down the toilet before the officer could take it away.(6)
Isolation remained Young's home until November 1940 when he managed to behave for almost a year and so earn his release. Within a few days, he was working in the Model Shop. McCain had a job in the Tailor Shop. On December 3, 1940, Young left his work station and approached McCain. The two talked for a few minutes. Then Young turned to leave and McCain resumed his work. Suddenly Young turned, jumped on McCain, and slashed his belly open with a brass shiv. McCain died of his wounds and Young was charged with first degree murder.
His trial which proved embarassing for Alcatraz officials. Young and his attornies convinced the jury that the Rock had driven the bank robber insane. The jury was so moved by Young and other convicts' tales of mistreatment by guards and other convicts that it found Young guilty only of manslaughter. Jury foreman Paul Verdier (who was president of the prestigious City of Paris department store) sent a telegram calling for an investigation of conditions at the prison. Johnston had seen the bad press coming in the middle of the trial and had asked Director Bennett for a statement. Within a few days of Young's sentencing by an outraged Judge Roche (who told Young that he'd sentenced men to death for lesser crimes), Bennett issued a press release condemning the verdict and expressing his confidence in Warden Johnston.
There would be more escape attempts from the Rock. Guards would be taken hostage and forced to watch their captors try to cut through the tool-proof bars of the mat shop with a grinder. In another attempt, Floyd Hamilton would be presumed dead, only to turn up in the mat shop after crawling up from a sea cave where he'd hidden for a few days. John Giles would come closer to escaping than any other man by stealing the pieces of a Technical Sargeant's uniform and slipping aboard the launch carrying laundry and anti-aircraft relief to Angel Island. And, in 1946, Bernard Paul Coy would use a crudely-fashioned pressure jack to spread the bars of the west gun cage so he could surprise and disarm the guard. Coy and two of his henchmen -- Paul Cretzer and Marvin Hubbard -- would die at the end of a three-day-long siege by guards from the BOP and a detachment of combat-savvy Marines. It would be the bloodiest affair in the Rock's history, claiming the lives of two guards as well as the three convicts.
By the time Coy was buried in Colma's Woodlawn Cemetery, Doc had been dead for seven years. Coy's grave lay less than a mile from the potter's field where Barker was laid to rest. Whether George responded to Coroner Leland's telegram is unknown. The Bureau of Prisons buried Ma's son in Olivet Cemetery's Cosmos Plot, a grassy plot of unmarked graves at the foot of San Bruno Mountain. Back in Oklahoma, George maintained the family graveyard behind the gas station he ran. He never made much of it. When someone would notice the wooden markers and ask what they were, he'd say simply "That's Ma and the boys." He never mentioned that one of monuments was only a cenotaph, raised for a missing son who was buried far to the West; in the last basin before the Coast Ranges rose again to be undercut by the relentless undulations of the sea.
Notes:
Scan the Bibliography
Examine a Chronology of Social Violence
View Joel's Gallery of Alcatraz Images
| COMING SOON! Alcatraz: The Warden Johnston Years Historic documents, biographies, bibliographic materials, and other information about America's most notorious prison |