Infamous America - ALCATRAZ Ep. 2 | “Blastout”

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

In the 1940s, the situation on Alcatraz took a dark turn. A brutal escape attempt claims two lives, but also turns a guard into a hero. And then “Doc” Barker, of the infamous Barker Gang, leads a breakout that always has a violent conclusion, and long lasting effects. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harold Stites had seen plenty of brutality before he took his first job at Alcatraz in 1937. He'd been a guard at Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. He'd broken up his fair share of cellmates trying to stab each other or beat each other. But on May 23rd, 1938, Stites found himself in the middle of something new. It was one of the most savage escape attempts ever seen on Alcatraz. Three prisoners attacked an unarmed guard with a half. hammer and bludgeoned him to death. Officer Stites shot and killed one of the prisoners

and effectively neutralized the escape. But not before the entire prison community witnessed the ever-climbing stakes of trying to break out of America's most isolated and infamous prison. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy time advanced gummies from mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN. So you can get something that's very low in THC, but higher in CBD, which helps turn off the stress, and CBN, which is the thing that makes

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This is Chapter 2, Blastout. On October 12, 1933, the U.S. Department of Justice acquired the disciplinary barracks on Alcatraz Island. They modernized it and increased its security. The government then placed Alist. Alcatraz and the federal prison system. Officials believed it was America's strongest prison, and it was escape-proof. They were wrong.

The first two escape attempts during Alcatraz's tenure as a federal prison were strange, but they weren't especially violent. In 1936, inmate Joseph Bowers climbed over barbed wire fencing behind the prison's incinerator. Guards shot over his head to try to get him to climb down. Ultimately, Bowers dropped to his death. Authorities concluded that he wasn't trying to escape, but rather to commit suicide. A year and a half later, inmates Ralph Rowe and Theodore Cole sawed through the bars of the prison's match shop. They punched out panes of glass and dropped to the ground below.

Then they ran to the water line. They escaped with floats they'd made out of fuel canisters. Neither Roe nor coal were ever seen again, and most witnesses and prison authorities agreed they must have drowned. The third escape attempt at Alcatraz during its modern era as a federal prison was different. This attempt would forever stand out in the history of the rock. The first instigator was Tom Limerick. Limerick arrived in Alcatraz in October, 1935. He was 33 years old, and he'd already picked up a long list of crimes.

After spending time at the Nebraska State Pen for a string of armed robberies, Limerick sealed his fate with one final felony. In November 1934, he used a sawed-off shotgun and a pistol to rob a bank in South Dakota. He and his accomplice took three hostages and fled. Law enforcement dubbed Limerick the number one bank robber of the Northwest, until he was captured and sent to life in prison. After a short stint at Leavenworth, he was transferred to Alcatraz. The second man involved in the escape was a 26-year-old career criminal.

He was James Lucas, and he was serving a 30-year sentence at Alcatraz for bank robbery and attempted murder in Texas. Even in prison, Lucas managed to make a name for himself. He was clever. In June of 1936, Lucas stole a single scissor blade from the prison clothing room. warning, he started stabbing famous inmate Al Capone. He claimed the gangster threatened him. Lucas inflicted only minor wounds on Capone, but it earned him time in solitary confinement.

The third man in the job was Rufus Franklin. Like Tom Limerick and James Lucas, Franklin began committing crimes in his early teens. At age 17, Franklin was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder. While on temporary parole to attend his mother's funeral, Franklin and an accomplice held up a bank in Alabama. Prison officials packed him off to Alcatraz shortly thereafter. In May of 1938, Limerick, Lucas, and Franklin saw their chance to escape the island fortress. At about 2 o'clock in the afternoon of May 23rd, 1938, senior guard Roy Klein was supervising prisoners in the woodworking shop. Klein was unarmed because he worked so closely with prisoners.

He walked into an adjacent room to take inventory of supplies. This was the moment Lucas, Franklin, and Limerick had been waiting for. The three inmates scrambled to a window and knocked out the glass pane. Klein returned to the room in the middle of the escape. Without hesitation, all three prisoners jumped on Klein. They beat him with their fists. Then Franklin took a hammer and hit, Klein on the head, crushing the guard's skull. He continued to pound on Klein's head, even after it was

clear the man was unconscious and bleeding profusely. Then the prisoners crawled through the window of the woodworking shop. They cut through barbed wire and made their way to the roof. They brought the hammer, some lead weights, and other pieces of metal they'd collected. Harold Stites was on guard duty in the rooftop tower. He heard suspicious noises behind him. When he turned, he saw the three prisoners. As soon as they made eye contact with Stites, they rushed at him. Each prisoner threw their metal objects at the windows of the guard tower, hoping to break the glass.

Their goal was to knock out Stites and seize his guns. But Officer Stites was faster than the prisoners. Although the glass in the tower was shatterproof, he was able to fire through it from the inside. He managed to fire a warning shot. but the prisoners kept advancing from different angles. One managed to hit Stites with a piece of metal, but the guard bravely stood his ground.

Stites fired again and wounded Franklin in the shoulder. But Limerick and Lucas kept advancing. Stites fired again and hit Limerick in the forehead. Limerick dropped to the ground, mortally wounded. With two of his companions out of action, James Lucas surrendered. Inmate Tom Limerick, died in the prison hospital. Officer Roy Klein died at a mainland hospital. The trial of Franklin

and Lucas lasted only three weeks, and it was emotional. Prosecutors showed the jury gory photographs of Klein's horribly disfigured face and head. No one was surprised when the jury convicted Franklin and Lucas of first-degree murder and gave them life sentences. Rufus Franklin, who was found with the bloody hammer in his hand, spent the longest term in solitary confinement in the history of Alcatraz. Newspapers called Officer Harold Stites a hero. He stopped three dangerous criminals from leaving the island. Stites didn't talk much about the episode, but he took extra precautions.

Day or night, whenever he walked to his bungalow on the island, he took a different route, and he frequently changed his work hours. He later told a family member that he always felt the felons were lying in wait for him. To some degree, they were. They were watching his every move, and not just him. Several inmates were studying the routines of all the guards. The ringleader of the next escape attempt was Arthur Barker. He was better known as Doc Barker of the infamous Barker gang,

which you will definitely hear about in a future season. Doc Barker and his siblings had been raised into lives of crime by their mother Kate, who was better known as Ma Barker. The family and their associates had been terrorizing the Midwest since the early 1920s. By the early 30s, they were on the same level as the other notorious outlaws of the era, John Dillinger, Babyface Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd, except they were far more violent than Dillinger and Floyd. They were robbers, kidnappers, and killers.

The gang met its end in January 1935 after a four-hour shootout with police. Doc Barker had been arrested several days earlier, but a couple of the Corps members died in the gunfire and the last one escaped. That one was Alvin Creepy Carpus. He stayed on the run for more than a year before he was caught and sent to Alcatraz with Doc Barker. But Creepy Carpus wasn't part of Doc's crew for the escape attempt. Doc recruited four men for the job, and they all had dangerous and disturbing backgrounds. Henry Young's was probably the most troubling. He was born into extreme poverty and suffered at the hands of a very cruel father.

In 1932, Young and an acquaintance robbed a fellow drifter and left him tied up in a box car in snowy weather. The man nearly froze to death, but Young showed no remorse. After serving time in a Montana prison, Young committed several more robberies and at least two kidnappings. those landed him in a Washington State prison, which called him vicious and unscrupulous. The warden also noted that Young was clever and capable of manipulating others to start trouble on his behalf. And so the prison system shipped him to Alcatraz. Young started making trouble the second he arrived on the rock. He led a general work strike on behalf of dozens of inmates.

He yelled threats at officers and other prisoners. He threw items from his cell and vandalized every workspace to which he was exposed. Young didn't get along with many other inmates at Alcatraz, but he did have a friend in Doc Barker. They were both from Missouri, and both had spent the bulk of their lives robbing and kidnapping. In the mid-1930s, Barker formed his own gang in prison. He rounded out his crew with Rufus McCain, William Martin, and Dale Stamp Hill. It was Dale who figured out how they'd get out of their cells. They were going to cut right through the bars.

D-Block was one of the few areas in Alcatraz that had remained just as it had been when it was used by the military. The Prison Bureau had upgraded the security in many other places on the island, but not here. The cell bars were still the old, soft, flat-iron variety, instead of the modern round bars that were rugged and reinforced. When Dale Stamp Hill saw the flat, soft bars in D-block, he thought about how easy it would be to bend them. All he needed was a simple contraption. He joined up with his old friend Doc Barker, whom he'd served time with in Oklahoma, and they quietly began talking about a breakout. Barker convinced an inmate in the blacksmith shop to make some saw blades from an old wood saw. He then had the inmate make a bar spreader with two bolts of metal and a crosspiece.

When the spreader was used with a crescent wrench, an inmate could exert enough force to push apart a section of bars. Over the course of several weeks, Doc Barker, Dale Stamphill, Henry Young, Rufus McCain, and William Martin sawed through the bars of their cells. They replaced the cut pieces with wax and black paint so the guards wouldn't notice. Early in the morning of January 13, 1939, the five inmates waited for, for the guards to do their rounds. At 3 a.m., after the guards had passed, the prisoners removed their pre-cut bars.

They slipped into the narrow cell block corridor. Here, they used a homemade bar spreader for the wall to the outside and dropped down eight feet to the dirt below. In no time at all, they were out of the cell house and in a race to get off the island. Barker and Stamphill made their way to an alcove to collect driftwood to make a flotation

vice. Martin, McCain, and Young headed to the docks to find lumber to make a raft. What they hadn't counted on was an overly vigilant guard. A half an hour after the inmates left their cells, a guard decided to do an extra check on D-block. He received a shock when he walked past Dale Stamp Hill's cell. The bars of the cell door were missing. The guard raised the alarm and the island roared to life in the middle of the night. Down on the dock, McCain, Young, and Martin launched a makeshift raft into the frigid waters of the bay. But as they got farther from the island, Young and Martin noticed that McCain got more and more agitated. McCain finally admitted that he couldn't swim.

As the raft drifted farther into the bay, McCain became more and more frantic. He was so panicked that he threatened to capsize the raft. Fearing for their lives, the three men were. turned back and surrendered themselves to the guards. Barker and Stamphill were still in the alcove trying to build a raft when a search boat spotted them. The guards ordered them to raise their hands. They might not have heard the instructions or they didn't comply fast enough. The guards opened fire and Barker and Stamphill suffered leg wounds and fell to the ground. Again, they were told to raise their hands. Stamphill managed to get his up, but Barker was in so much

pain that he tried to stand up to relieve it. The guards shot him in the head. Doc Barker died later that night. The four surviving inmates had their prison time extended, and they were sent to the hole, the isolation chambers that were as bad as they look in the movies, and maybe worse. Two years later, Henry Young fashioned a makeshift knife out of a blade in the machine shop. Just after the 10 a.m. headcount. He ran downstairs to the tailor shop and stabbed fellow escapee Rufus McCain in the stomach. McCain died in agony five hours later. Henry Young was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. His lawyer successfully argued that Young was insane because of his brutal punishment in isolation. But everyone agreed Young was still enraged by McCain ruining their escape.

And Henry Young's work wasn't done. He was indirect. responsible for connecting the two men who would organize the biggest and bloodiest escape attempt in Alcatraz history. There was a long build-up to the escape attempt that turned Alcatraz into a war zone in 1946. It began in 1941 when four inmates tried a poorly planned scheme to force their way off the island. One day after lunch, an inmate told a guard that a piece of machinery was broken. When the guard examined the equipment, the inmate and three others overpowered him. The four convicts gagged him and tied his hands and feet with twine. Shortly after the attack, another guard walked in unexpectedly.

The inmates overpowered him as well. One inmate stood as a lookout while the other three used a grinding stone to try to cut through the window bars. But the bars were toolproof. And then a captain of the guard entered the shop. The four inmates grabbed him, and he quickly pointed out a flaw in their plan. They were now holding three guards hostage. When the guards didn't check in, the alarm would sound. The inmates needed to cut through three bars to get out, and they hadn't even made it through one yet.

So they decided to give up. All four convicts earned significant time in solitary confinement, but they weren't done trying. The half-baked scheme ended up being a trial. run for the big show. Two of the men involved would be primetime players in the next big breakout. They were Sam Shockley and Joseph Kretzer. Like so many others in Alcatraz, Sam Shockley arrived after a life of rural poverty and little education. He had trouble blending in with the general population, and later, he was determined to have an IQ ranging in the low to mid-60s.

The guards at Alcatraz considered Shockley to be impulsively dangerous. He suffered from mental illness and hallucinations. He had a reputation for violent fits directed at the guards and other prisoners. Like Henry Young, he liked to throw and break things. He also started fires in various workshops by cutting electrical wires in just the right way. Joseph Kretzer was far more intellectually capable than Shepard. Shockly, but he was a career thief who was encouraged by his father to steal cars from the time he was 14 years old. It surprised no one who knew him that by 1938, when he was 26, he was number

four on the FBI's most wanted list. Kretzer was violent. He beat his girlfriend severely, and along with accomplices, he robbed nearly 80 banks. The FBI finally caught him in August of 1939, and he was given a 25 year sentence at McNeil Island in Washington State. No sooner had Krezer started his sentence that he was caught with a handcuffed key in his mouth. He fashioned the key from a belt buckle, and a report noted that it was nearly an exact duplicate. In 1940, Kretzer and a fellow inmates stole a prison truck while cutting trees for work detail. They used their axes to warn off the guards, and they used a vehicle to slam through a prison gate. They hid in the woods of the island for three days without food or water until they were finally captured.

The pair were put on trial for the escape attempt, but during a lunch break at the trial, Kretzer and his friend viciously attacked and killed a U.S. Marshal. And so, in August 1940, Kretzer and his friend were sent to Alcatraz. Less than a year after their arrival, they participated in a failed escape attempt while working in the match shop. and Kretzer was sentenced to permanent segregation. The few privileges he had left were revoked. In April, 1944, Kretzer was allowed to spend time in the recreation yard, and he was assaulted by Henry Young.

And that's how Joe Kretzer met his partner in crime for the upcoming escape attempt. While Kretzer was in lockdown for the fight with Henry Young, he made friends with the library orderly, a man named Bernard Koi. Bernie Coy and Joe Cretzer talked a lot, especially about Cretzer's involvement in the 1941 escape attempt, in which he and Sam Shockley bound and gagged the guards. No doubt Cretzer bragged that some of his ideas had been used in another recent attempt. Four inmates once again distracted the guards and tied them up and gagged them. The four inmates managed to swim a few dozen yards out to sea before the guards finally got loose and sounded the alarm.

A prison sniper shot one of the men. the inmates dead. The other three swam back to the safety of Alcatraz and longer prison sentences. Kretzer and McCoy analyzed the attempt. They examined the things that worked and the things that didn't, and they incorporated information they'd learned from other attempts in recent years. In the year leading up to their attempt in May of 1946, both Kretzer and Koi donned masks of innocence. Kretzer wrote letters to the warden, begging for work detail. He said that that he learned his lesson from his three years of isolated punishment. Kretzer had his wife Edna make frequent visits to the island,

where she made sure to compliment the guards. Edna also wrote nice letters to the warden, reassuring him that she was helping her husband and he would be good. Bernie Coy's job as a library orderly allowed him opportunities to interact with the guards, and he took these opportunities to be friendly. Like Edna, he complimented the officers. Over time, the prison staff came to regard Koi as a mature con and reported that he got along well with most everyone. In short, they trusted Bernie Koi.

But neither Kretzer nor Koi had any intention of serving their full sentences at Alcatraz. During his sentencing in 1937, Koi said murder meant nothing to him, and no prison could hold him. Kretzer convinced the warden that he was sincere about his readiness to reform. The warden not only assigned him to work detail, but transferred him to B-block. This cell block offered significantly more opportunities for socializing with other prisoners than D-block. Over the months leading up to May 2, 1946, Bernie Coy carefully studied systemic weaknesses at Alcatraz. He found one in the West End Gun Gallery. He thought it might provide a way out if he could acquire the right tools, the right time, and the right people.

As he studied the limitations of Alcatraz, he also studied the strengths and capabilities of various inmates who might be willing to be part of the breakout. Just as important, he started bribing those who would not be part of the breakout and who needed to keep their mouths shut. As Coy carefully took note of the routines of the guards, he began to collect his co-conspirators. In addition to Joe Cretzer, Coy picked Sam Shockley and three others. All five of these men understood that in order for this escape to work, they would have to follow Coy's plan to a T. They knew they would have to commit to doing whatever was necessary to carry it out, even if it was murder. Next time on Infamous America, the gang stages an escape that turns into an assault. The assault turns into a siege. The siege turns into a battle for Alcatraz.

The bloodiest escape attempt in the history of the U.S. prison system is next week on infamous America. This season was written by award-winning author Julia Brickland, primary research by Joey McAdams, original music by Rob Valier, editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show,

please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. please visit our website blackbarrelmedia.com for more details and join us on social media. We're blackbarrel media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.