Alcatraz (29 page)

Working on the cleanup crew the afternoon of June 25, 1937, Rufe Persful walked into the garage area to sweep and pick up trash. Without saying a word to his co-worker or to the guard supervising them, Persful
moved into a section of the building occupied by the fire truck, removed the ax that was attached to the side of the vehicle, placed his left hand on the engine hood, and chopped off four fingers. When the other inmate gave a shout, the guard ran into the garage and found Persful walking toward him with the ax in his right hand and his left hand bleeding profusely. The guard grabbed the ax, applied a handkerchief as a tourniquet to Persful’s wrist, and then placed his own hand over the stumps of the fingers to try to stop the bleeding. The guard and the other prisoner rushed Persful to the trash truck and drove up the hill to the cell house, where he was taken to the hospital. As the medical staff tried to treat his wounds, Persful had to be forcibly restrained as he struggled to grab the razor that was being used to clean the stumps. When the deputy warden came into the hospital ward Persful told him that he would have cut off his other hand and his feet if he had found a way to do it.
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In the month after this event, Persful experienced delusions and hallucinations. He insisted that he be moved to get away from an alligator in his room, claimed that the warden had cut his hand off, and tried to make nooses out of sheets, towels, and an electric cord. The chief medical officer reported to Warden Johnston and to Bureau headquarters that an examining board had diagnosed Persful as suffering from “dementia praecox, hebephrenic type” and recommended that he be transferred to the Springfield Medical Center.

What the doctor did not report was that Rufe Persful had a very serious problem—his fellow convicts wanted him dead. In the course of his long criminal career, Persful had committed acts that made him a pariah in the eyes of other inmates. At the age of eighteen, he had been sentenced to fifteen years in the Arkansas State Penitentiary for killing and robbing an elderly man. Arkansas prisons had no walls, and convicts worked in fields and on farms under the supervision of inmate guards mounted on horseback and armed with high-powered rifles. When Persful arrived at the Tucker Prison Farm he was offered a job as a trusty guard, a “high power.” The high power’s job was to shoot any convict who tried to escape, and his reward for stopping an escape, apart from not having to labor in the fields, was that he could earn a quick parole. In the performance of these duties, Persful shot and killed a prisoner who was attempting to escape. His sentence was reduced from fifteen to nine years and he was almost immediately released on parole.

Some eighteen months later, Persful was indicted for shooting a woman in the back with a shotgun and his parole was revoked, but he was not apprehended for two years. When he was picked up and returned
to prison, owing to the “congested condition of the [court] docket at that time,” state authorities never tried him on the charge of attempting to kill the woman. Back at Tucker Prison Farm as a parole violator, Persful resumed his position as a high power, shot and killed another escaping prisoner, and was paroled again. Several months later he was arrested on a charge of robbery with firearms, for which he received a new sentence of five years. He returned to his position as trusty guard and once again halted an escape, killing one prisoner and wounding three other men so gravely that they were left “permanently crippled.”
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As usual, Persful was released on parole, but at the request of a circuit court judge, for reasons unknown, that parole was revoked and he was returned to the prison farm and his old job. In October 1933, for the fourth time, Persful shot and killed another convict attempting to escape, and eight months later received his fourth parole.

When Persful entered the Atlanta penitentiary in December 1934 to begin a twenty-year term for kidnapping, the initial staff evaluation concluded that he would not pose any unusual disciplinary problems.
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But at the federal penitentiary Persful found himself in a prison world where a vastly different convict code prevailed, one that emphasized the importance of inmates sticking together and helping each other out and certainly not interfering with any man’s attempt to escape. This code also condemned offenses committed against women and children.

Two other Tucker Prison Farm convicts had been sent to Atlanta with Persful. When they circulated word around the penitentiary that Persful had killed and maimed escaping prisoners, and that he had shot a woman in the back, the Atlanta inmates began threatening and beating him. Although the beatings were not officially reported, it came to the attention of Atlanta officials that Persful’s life had been threatened and that he was being ostracized and periodically assaulted by other inmates. It was determined that he needed placement in a prison far removed from the deep South, one that afforded tighter controls over inmates while providing security appropriate for a man with a record of violence and a long sentence—namely the newly opened penitentiary at Alcatraz.

Once again Persful’s record in Arkansas preceded him to the island, and when he arrived in December 1935 he found himself confronting more threats and violence from the Alcatraz convicts (alerted by others transferred from Atlanta). Shortly after his arrival, Persful was locked up in solitary confinement for fighting with longtime convict Francis Keating, who had called him “a shotgun son of a bitch” and attacked him in the yard. Persful had to be watched closely when he was in proximity to
other inmates in the dining room and in the yard and could not be placed in any of the usual work assignments. For this reason he was assigned the job on the cleanup crew.

By September 1936 Persful had become so anxious over his safety that he wrote to Warden Johnston, appealing for a transfer to another prison, telling the warden that in the performance of his duty as a trusty guard he had killed and wounded a number of prisoners and, “as a result, it is only natural that many enemies were made among the criminal element.” Several of these “enemies,” he went on, tried to poison him in the Arkansas penitentiary and later, after committing federal offenses that resulted in their being sent to the Atlanta Penitentiary, they informed other inmates of his actions as a trusty guard. Persful claimed that he had tried to get away from these men by asking for a transfer to Alcatraz but then found out too late that they were going to arrive on the Rock before he did, and they had turned the Alcatraz inmates against him.
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His request for a transfer to the penitentiary at McNeil Island was rejected; nine months later he used the ax to emphasize the seriousness of his problem.

The question for Alcatraz officials was whether Persful’s self-mutilation was an attempt at suicide, the act of a deranged man, or a ruse to get off the island. The mental illness theory was supported by Persful’s behavior in the prison hospital after he severed his fingers and this provided the rationale for his transfer in January 1938—first to the mental ward at Leavenworth and then to the Springfield Medical Center. His mental health rapidly improved, and in October 1940 Persful was transferred to McNeil Island. Three days after his arrival, however, word had spread among the McNeil prisoners about his actions in Arkansas and when he walked into the prison dining room he was greeted by loud and prolonged booing from the inmates. Subsequent to this incident he received his meals in his cell, was kept locked up when other inmates were moving about the cell block, and had to be seated by himself in the rear of the auditorium during movies. The McNeil staff were required to watch Persful closely at all times to prevent other prisoners from assaulting him; his job assignment was cleaning the cell house after the other inmates had left to work elsewhere in the prison.

In November 1941 the McNeil Island warden requested that Persful be sent elsewhere, and Director James Bennett asked Warden Johnston to consider taking him back and confining him to permanent isolation in D block. The chief medical officer on the island argued against this proposal based on his judgment that Persful would, under these circumstances, become psychotic again. Several months later, when the McNeil
Island staff tried to place him in a group cell, Persful’s cell mates warned him and the staff that if he was not moved they “would cut his fucking throat out.” Persful was returned to a single cell and resumed his restricted contact routine. Nevertheless eighteen months later, when his cell door was opened for cleaning, he was attacked by another inmate who shouted, “I’ve been waiting for months to do this”; at this point, Persful appealed to the warden:

Now I am asking you to do me a favor, for the rest of the time I’m here I want you to order my cell door padlocked, leave me where I am at, leave my radio and smoking tobacco in here and shoo everyone to hell away from me.”
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In subsequent years Persful was attacked on two more occasions. In April 1948 he was conditionally released from his federal sentence and took up residence with a relative in Gary, Indiana. He never returned to the federal prison system, where for fourteen years he had suffered a unique form of punishment.

Bowers, Stadig, and Persful were all morose and solitary types. While their mental health problems could be attributed at least partly to the harsh Alcatraz regime and convict culture, they brought these problems with them to the island. This was not the case with another inmate.

Hayes Van Gorder had attended Luther College in Iowa and the University of Minnesota and taught school until he was convicted of murdering his father-in-law, for which he received an eight-year sentence in the Iowa State Penitentiary. He was released in 1924 but shortly thereafter came into federal custody with a twenty-eight-year term for forging government documents and using the mails to defraud. He soon developed a reputation as a writ writer, enhanced by his success in escaping from Atlanta through the use of a bogus habeas corpus order. He was captured a year later and a five-year term for escape was added to his sentence.

At Atlanta and Leavenworth Van Gorder was noted for his willingness to help other inmates with the legal briefs—activities that earned him a transfer to Alcatraz and high status among the convicts when he arrived on the island. But the men who knew him noticed that soon after his arrival he became very depressed and took up a largely solitary existence, spending most of his time reading. He lost weight, his memory for recent events became impaired, and during several outbursts he
tore up his cell—and he stopped filing writs. Earlier psychiatric evaluations had noted evidence of “paranoid trends,” but his growing difficulties at Alcatraz were diagnosed as resulting from “senile arteriosclerosis.”
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His fellow prisoners were not aware of this assessment, but they knew something was wrong; their interpretation was that the intellectual who was a good con in a less restrictive prison could not stand up to the pressure of doing time on the Rock.

Van Gorder was admitted for observation to the hospital ward in September 1936. In the months following he experienced hallucinations, as well as bad dreams that caused him to cry out at night. He expressed bitterness toward the judge who sentenced him to prison, not because he was innocent, but because the length of the term was so long. He argued that prison officials should not hold his escape attempts against him given the injustice of his sentence and he complained about the climate, the lack of privileges, and the “depressed atmosphere” on the island. In July 1937, after he was declared to be “of unsound mind,” he was transferred to the Springfield Medical Center. He complained of stomach problems and was diagnosed with cancer; in April 1938 he died from the disease. Hayes Van Gorder was buried in Springfield with his wife in attendance—she had remained faithful to him through all the years of his prison terms, including the time he served for killing her father.
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The shooting of Bowers, Stadig’s suicide, Persful’s effort at self-mutilation, and the sharp decline in Van Gorder’s mental health, all within a relatively short period, combined to plant firmly in the minds of inmates an image of Alcatraz as psychologically destructive for some of their fellow convicts.

On September 20, 1937, James Johnston assembled his officers and advised them to be alert for trouble. After the noon meal, when the bell was sounded for the inmates to return to their jobs, twenty-three men remained in their cells. Each protester was interviewed by Deputy Warden Edward J. Miller and offered the opportunity to return to work. All refused and they were removed to disciplinary segregation cells. The strikers said they were protesting because they did the same work as men at other penitentiaries and ought to have the same privileges. The following day, ten more inmates refused to report to their work details and they too were locked in segregation cells. That evening, the protesters began yelling and creating
a disturbance. Four of “the most boisterous” strikers were sent down to lower solitary in an attempt to prevent the protest from spreading over the cell house.
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The next day another twenty-four inmates joined the protest and they were placed in cells on the unused side of A block. By September 24, one hundred prisoners had joined the strike.

Warden Johnston agreed to meet with some of the protesters, including Burton Phillips. Having been locked up in solitary four times for refusing to work and refusing to obey orders, Phillips had several grievances. Before the strike, he had written to James Bennett, who had succeeded Sanford Bates as director of the federal prison system in 1937, complaining that the constitutional rights of Alcatraz prisoners were being violated:

Is it not denying the prisoner access to due process of law by denying him access to the legal publications which would inform him what the law is and how the courts hold on legal questions in which he is vitally interested since his liberty is involved? . . . I’ll grant you the point that there is nothing in the constitution to keep you from starving, torturing and mistreating me but it must be a regrettable oversight on your part to deny me full access to legal documents.