CRIME: Jail Breakage

At Folsom, Calif., where on Thanksgiving Day 1927, ten convicts and a guard were killed rioting, Warden Clarence A. Larkin of California’s toughest State prison, was last fortnight interviewing inmates about parole applications. Suddenly seven of some 40 convicts in his office sprang out of line, bared knives and a dummy pistol. One demanded that Warden Larkin telephone the watch tower guards to hand down rifles to the inmates. Others covered two guards. In a room nearby, the warden’s secretary, Jack Whalen, heard the commotion, recalled what Warden Larkin had told the prison staff: “If I am ever kidnapped and I order you not to shoot and you obey my order, you won’t be here next day. No matter what I tell you, you start shooting.” Whalen telephoned the watch tower guards to expect trouble. When the convicts, taking Warden Larkin and the guards with them, reached the prison yard, the captive guards put up a fight. Convict knives flashed. From the watch towers ten or twelve rifle bullets whistled into the melee. When it ended, one guard and one convict lay dead, six others lay unconscious in the yard. Another convict soon died of his wounds, and last week, after six blood transfusions, Warden Larkin died of his infected stab wounds. As the five surviving convicts were being indicted for murder other big prisons had their own troubles.

Alcatraz, gloomy fortress on an island in San Francisco Bay is the Federal Government’s stronghold for hardened offenders. At Alcatraz trouble started last week when 23 prisoners refused to leave their cells to work. One hundred of the 280 inmates went on strike. When Warden James A. Johnston went to the prison mess-hall during inspection, Convict Burton Phillips, serving a life term for kidnapping, jumped on the 63-year-old warden from behind. Before guards could help him, Warden Johnston had been knocked down and savagely beaten.

In Cleveland, on Aug. 6, Sheriff Martin O’Donnell’s office received a scrawled anonymous letter: “This is just to warn you that the 2 Bird bros. you have in for bank robbery have it all set to break out at 3 o’clock this afternoon with their pal Widmer. . . .” A special guard was placed around the cells of Frank and Charles Bird, young Missouri desperadoes awaiting trial for bank robbery, and their friend James Widmer who last year escaped from the Missouri Penitentiary. Nothing happened.

Last week, shortly after his wife, Barbara Bird, had paid a call on him in jail, Charles Bird cornered two deputies with two guns, put them in a cell while he released his brother, Widmer and a 19-year-old youth named Theodore Slapik, awaiting trial for murder. The four descended from the fourth floor to the basement in an elevator, dashed out the front door. A few moments later they pulled Municipal Judge Louis Petrash out of the driver’s seat of his car and roared off toward Cleveland’s Public Square at 60 m. p. h. Disregarding traffic signals they mowed down a woman pedestrian, breaking both her arms and legs. With the doors swinging wide-open and tires screeching around corners, the convicts outdistanced pursuing police.

By the time police found the third car abandoned by the desperadoes, Widmer and both Birds had disappeared, but in a nearby yard two small girls were screaming and pointing at a child-size pup tent in which they had been playing. Police surrounded the yard, converged on the tent. From it sheepishly emerged Theodore Slapik, his right thumb crudely bandaged where it had been hit by a detective’s bullet.

Tattnall State Prison, brand new “Alcatraz of the Piney Woods” was designed to stop Georgia chain-gang and prison-camp escapes, which have embarrassed Georgia’s Governor Eureth Dickinson Rivers. Last week, the Governor of Georgia was embarrassed again. Six of “escape proof” Tattnalls first tenants coolly sawed through their bars, wriggled through a trap door. Three of the six then clambered over a barbed wire fence, scampered off into the pine woods.