Escape from Alcatraz (16 page)

Chapter 13

I
T WAS A FEW MINUTES
after one thirty. The date: May 2, 1946, a Thursday. The working prisoners had filed out to the shops, and the drowsy quiet of a cathedral on a weekday afternoon pervaded the huge cellhouse. The only convict moving freely about was Bernard Paul Coy, on janitorial duty, and the swish of his soft-fibered push broom along the waxed floor created less sound than a buzzing fly. The Rock had deflated the braggart ego of this Kentucky bank robber: outwardly, at least, he appeared mild, inoffensive. Beneath the surface, violence was in ferment. Earlier in the day, as he distributed books from the library, he had stopped at the cell of Clarence Carnes, the teenaged, copper-hued Choctaw, and asked, “How much time you doin’? Life?” “No,” replied Carnes, “ninety-nine years.” And Coy said, “Well, I’ll tell you, old man, somethin’s comin’ off. If you want to go, okay, it’s a cinch.” Now, as he pushed the broom lazily down the lateral corridor at the west end of the cellhouse, Coy cast an occasional glance upward. He had an absent air, but the glances encompassed the dark figure of Bert Burch in the gun gallery and noted the progress of the guard’s slow patrol toward D Block.

At the bars of the end cell on the top tier of inside C Block, on Broadway, stood Joseph Paul Cretzer, his sullen eyes also on the gallery guard. He had returned to the general population only a week before after years in solitary, where he had plotted the thing that was about to happen. When the guard in the gallery moved out of his sight, Cretzer shifted his intent gaze to Coy, then to the clock on the wall above the lieutenant’s desk: twenty seconds past 1:38.

Coy, now athwart Broadway, pushed the broom casually. For days he had cased Burch, for days had timed his patrol: at 1:40 he would go through the door into the walled-off isolation section and there spend fifteen minutes. Today, the moment Burch stepped into D Block, Marvin Hubbard would leave the kitchen.

Burch, a lanky Oklahoman, approached the wooden door set in the gallery to stop drafts. He was carrying a Springfield 30.06 rifle on a shoulder strap, a holstered .45 pistol on his hip. Near the door hung a gasbilly and a long cord to lower Key 88, the key to the steel door into D Block from the cellhouse. He shoved through the draft door, saw his lunchbox on the floor, gave it a nudge with his foot, closed the door, and was gone.

Coy, slowly sweeping past C Block, circled toward a point just beyond the door to the mess hall.

At his cleanup work in the kitchen Marvin Hubbard kept a furtive eye on the wall clock. The minute hand jumped to 1:40. Hubbard leaned across the table to mop a stain, slipped a carving knife up his left sleeve, straightened, drawled to the officer on duty, “Finished, goin’ back to my cell.” He moved, not too briskly, up the hall and knocked on the gate.

Officer W. H. Miller, on duty in the cellhouse, stepped out of Broadway and opened it. He leaned over to frisk Hubbard, a routine with all culinary workers. Coy slugged him on the back of the head, and Hubbard’s fist bore into his face. Miller, though groggy, slipped a key off his key ring and into a pocket as they dragged him to Cell 403 on the outside bank of C Block. They tied him up, took his key ring.

They released Cretzer, impatient as a caged cougar in his top-tier cell, then the nineteen-year-old Carnes. With Miller’s keys they opened the door to the utility corridor of C Block, where they had stashed bar-spreading equipment stolen from the plumbing shop: two specially threaded brass pipes, a specially threaded nut, and a pair of plumber’s pliers.

Coy stripped to his long underwear. He climbed onto Hubbard’s shoulders, then stepped on his hands, and Hubbard hoisted him to the gun gallery twelve feet above the floor. Coy, agile as a monkey, swarmed up past a four-foot-high steel-plate shield, on up the bars, up to the roof where the bars flare out like a basket top. He set the spreader between two bars, applied the pliers. The gap widened, he squirmed through and clambered down to the upper deck of the gallery, raced down a stairway to the first level, ran to the wooden door, grabbed the gasbilly off the wall, and crouched. The convicts below kept under the gun cage, out of sight.

Tense minutes passed. Footsteps approached. Coy saw the knob turn, the door start to open. He lunged, knocked Burch off balance, pinned him against the bars. He cracked the metal gasclub against the guard’s jaw. Burch brought up the rifle. Coy clutched the barrel, swung again. Burch dodged, caught the blow on the back of the head. They grappled. Burch tripped over his lunchbox, sprawled backward. The rifle clattered to the floor. Coy leaped on Burch as he hit the concrete. They struggled for the revolver in the hip holster. It bounced free, out of reach. Coy got a hammer lock on the guard, beat him on the head, then worked his fingers inside his collar and twisted it tight, tighter, choking off his breath. Burch went limp, unconscious.

Coy stripped the guard, snatched the long key cord from its wall peg and lashed him to a conduit near the floor. He dropped the pistol and its twenty rounds of ammunition to Cretzer, then Key 88, and Cretzer ran to the door to D Block. Coy passed the club down to Carnes, then the pliers, Burch’s uniform, fifty rifle cartridges. He kept the rifle and passed stealthily into the isolation block.

Cecil Corwin, middle-aged, graying officer in D Block, heard unusual noises in the cellhouse, then the key in the door. He ran to jam the lock. Coy, rifle leveled, barked from the gun gallery: “Open that goddam door and be goddam quick about it!” Corwin moved away, the door swung open, in barged Cretzer, Hubbard, and Carnes.

Cretzer wanted Whitey Franklin freed, but his dark cell could be opened only when an electric switch was thrown, turning the lock to key position.

“Open that goddam switch box!” Cretzer ordered.

Corwin opened the box and started to reach in.

“Wait!” cried Carnes. “If you pull that lever, does it ring an alarm in the Armory?”

“Yes,” said Corwin.

“Pass it up,” said Cretzer. “We’re behind schedule. Let’s get out to the yard and down to the launch.”

“What about them?” yelled Coy, gesturing toward the upper cells.

They opened those doors by the manual control. Twelve convicts rushed out, saw Coy’s rifle and Cretzer’s pistol, and ran down the circular stairway shouting, “The cons have taken over, let’s go!” Most of them warily stayed in D Block. Two who did not were Miran Thompson and Sam Shockley.

The mutineers put Corwin in Cell 403 with Miller and started for the yard door, to the left of the mess hall. Burch, who had come to and worked the cord loose, peered over the gallery shield, into the startled eyes of Cretzer. Cretzer whipped up the .45 and snapped two quick shots. “Lay down, you sonofabitch!” Burch ducked.

(Burch later testified he had never before been in a gunfight. “I immediately got as close to the floor as I could. Shells were ricocheting a lot. They’d whistle and sing. I couldn’t see any, but I heard them zip.” Why had he not used the gallery phone to alert the Armorer? “I think I had that in mind, but a couple of shots from Cretzer took that out of me—mighty quick.”)

Officer Joseph Burdett, in the kitchen, saw Coy run past the mess-hall door, thought he was in a fight with another prisoner and rushed out. He landed in Cell 403. As the convicts moved out again toward the yard door, Burdett asked Carnes if he might untie Miller. “Go ahead,” Carnes said. The young Choctaw unknowingly prevented a wholesale break. Burdett unbound Miller, and they hid the key to the yard, the key Miller had pocketed.

At the yard door Cretzer and Coy took turns trying keys, fumbling and cursing. Epithets filled the cellhouse as they stormed back to Cell 403. They searched Miller, then beat him pulpy. Cretzer said, “Well, that fouls it up. Frisco’s far away as ever.”

They held a council. Surrender? They took stock: a rifle, a revolver, a carving knife, a gasbilly, pipe pliers for a dagger. “Let’s go out first-class,” said Cretzer. They took positions behind B and C Blocks, commanding both the yard door and the front entrance down Broadway.

Steward Robert C. Bristow, returning from a conference, came along Broadway on his way to the kitchen. Carnes’s arm shot out, encircling his neck, and the pliers threatened to close on his throat. He went quietly into Cell 403.

Guard Ernest B. Lageson, back from lunch, strolled down Broadway, was yanked off his feet, into Cell 403.

An inmate, coming up from the basement clothing room, found no guard to check him into the cellhouse. He reported this to Ed Stucker, the officer on duty below, who went to the top of the stairs and peered through the gate bars. No sign of Officer Miller. Something about the place, he couldn’t tell exactly what, gave him an uneasy feeling. He went back down and phoned the Armory. The Armorer thought there might be a fight in the kitchen and dispatched Captain Henry H. Weinhold, Lieutenant Joseph H. Simpson, and two officers, Carl Sundstrom and Robert R. Baker.

Cell 403 was getting crowded. Simpson, Sundstrom, and Baker went into Cell 402. As Baker, the chief mail censor, started in, Shockley said, “You goddam mail thief,” and punched him in the face. Sundstrom dropped his wallet and Cretzer snatched it up, extracted the money, and grinned. “A stickup.” They made Weinhold strip before pushing him into 403. Coy donned his captain’s uniform.

The missing key to the yard, their only way out, balked their grand plan to knock out the three main gun towers, storm down to the wharf, and capture the launch. Boiling with frustration, Coy strode into the mess hall with the powerful Springfield 30.06 to pick off the tower guards anyway, from windows there and in the kitchen.

It was now two thirty, and the Armorer was growing uneasy. He phoned the west gun gallery, got no response. And no word from the captain. He got on the intercom for a conference call to all posts.

Big Jim Comerford was leaning on the rail of the dock tower, watching Associate Warden Miller with a civilian paint crew below, when the call came. He went inside, listened, laid his rifle against the wall under the phone, came out again, and called down to Miller: “Trouble in the cellhouse. Better get up to the top.”

He heard something explode behind him and for an instant thought his pistol had discharged. Miller shouted, “Jim, get down!” But Comerford had already swung around and down, to grab his rifle. Coy’s first shot had crashed through a window of the tower (they were later bulletproofed), on through the metal sash of the window opposite. John Barker, in a gun box on the yard wall at the prison, saw the window shatter, a moment later saw the slug splash into the calm bay. As the bullet hit the sash metal a fragment spun off, ricocheted off another sash, and embedded itself in the wood stock of Comerford’s rifle.

Miller jumped into a truck and roared up the Cliffside road.

Coy’s next shot went to the hill tower. The bullet hit an angle iron on the catwalk and fractured, and crippling splinters ripped into Guard Roy Best’s shins. In the road tower Irving Levison had the door propped open with the wood chuck to get a bit of fresh air. After the conference call, he decided to lock the door, leaned down to pull out the chuck—and Coy’s third shot crashed through, where his head had been.

The Armorer called Warden Johnston, at a late lunch. “There’s some trouble in the cellhouse. I don’t know what, but I think it’s bad.”

Johnston said, “If you think it’s bad, kick on the siren.” He crossed the road to the prison. Ed Miller, the associate, came staggering out of the cellhouse, gasping for breath, eyes watery, face a lamp-black mask.

“Somebody’s loose in there with a gun,” Miller said.

“Do you know who it is?”

“I think it’s Coy.”

“What happened to you?”

“I heard there was trouble and ran in with a gasbilly. I thought I saw an officer, but it was Coy. He said, ‘You sonofabitch, I’m going to kill you!’ I raised the club. He fired twice. The gasbilly burst in my face.”

Inside the cellhouse the convicts gloried in their insurrection. Carnes, the young Indian, patrolled in front of the two cells, swinging an officer’s club. He said, “Never thought I’d be a cop!”

Hubbard suggested they hold the captives as hostages to barter for their freedom. Cretzer laughed. “We don’t need hostages, we’re not makin’ any agreements. We want that goddam key!”

They hauled forth Officer Miller and again slugged him unconscious, but still no key to the yard door. They cursed and raged. Thompson now had the rifle. He swung it up and cried, “Let’s shoot the sonsabitches!”

The siren blew.

Captain Weinhold said to Cretzer: “You don’t have a chance. You’d be foolish to go out and get killed.”

“If we’re going to get killed,” Cretzer said, “we’ll kill you, too.”

Weinhold said, “You can only die once.”

Cretzer said, “Go ahead and die!”

He pulled the trigger, twice, fast. The .45 slugs ripped into the captain’s stomach, and he doubled over.

Shockley cried, “Kill all the sonsabitches!”

Cretzer aimed at Corwin. The bullet hit near the left eye and Corwin crumpled, blinded by blood.

Shockley, black eyes piercing, jumped up and down. “Kill every one of the yellow-bellied bastards! We won’t have any testimony against us.”

Cretzer emptied the pistol into the crowded cell. A slug crashed into Miller’s chest. Others dropped, played dead.

Cretzer walked to the next cell, reloading. He pumped bullets in there. Two rammed into Simpson’s chest and he fell flat on the cot. Baker slumped, slugs in both legs. Sundstrom hugged the floor behind Baker.

Shockley, wildly dancing, cried, “Hey, Joe, here’s a sonofabitch ain’t dead yet!”

Cretzer came back, inspected the carnage in 403. Bodies lay scattered grotesquely. Burdett, wounded, sprawled across the cot, his head and an arm hanging over the side, holding his breath. Carnes looked in too and said, “They’re all dead, let’s go!”

Shockley pointed, “That one! He moved!”

Cretzer said, “Oh, that’s Lageson. He’s my friend.”

Shockley said, “Friend, hell, he’ll go to court and spill his guts.”

Cretzer leveled the pistol at Lageson. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber.