The following day on March 26th, Stroud returned to his cell after supper to find a basket of fruit and candy on his cot. The armory guard had left a note for Stroud indicating that his eighteen-year-old brother Marcus had come to visit him from Alaska. Stroud learned that his brother had been turned away simply because he had been in the auditorium at the time, watching a movie. He was enraged that Marcus had traveled all the way from Alaska, only to be told to come back the following Monday.
Stroud would later claim he became worried that Turner would report him for breaching the silence rule during the previous meal and that the warden would then take away his visitation privilege with Marcus. He asserted that his only option was to speak with Turner again during the next meal period, to ask whether he had reported him. He said that he planned to plead with Turner for leniency.
The dining hall at Leavenworth, where Turner was murdered by Stroud.
Stroud later recounted his story to fellow inmate Joseph Duhamel, stating that during the next dinner meal and in sight of nearly two thousand fellow inmates; he simply raised his hand to talk with Turner. The true sequence of events that unfolded from this point forward is somewhat sketchy. The two started to exchange words and Turner apparently drew his club from under his left arm. Witnesses state that Stroud aggressively attempted to wrestle away Turner’s club, and in a manic rage, pulled a homemade knife and stabbed him violently in the upper chest. Turner fell hard to the cement floor and gasped a final breath before succumbing to the fatal knife wound. All of the men in the mess hall rose to their feet in shocked silence.
Stroud had just murdered a guard and everyone immediately knew the ramifications. Stroud would surely die by execution. The Captain of the Guard calmly approached the prisoner and asked him in a soft voice to drop his knife. As Stroud started to explain why he had stabbed Turner, he followed the Captain’s order and dropped the bloodied knife onto the floor.
In the timeless classic Birdman of Alcatrazby Thomas E. Gaddis, Turner is described as a “club happy screw” that was in constant conflict with inmates. Turner and Stroud are said to have had a long history of problematic encounters. However, it should be noted that there is no documented proof that Stroud and Turner had any prior conflicts beyond those stated here. At age twenty-six, Stroud had committed his second murder and he was now destined to face the death penalty.
Stroud’s trial began in May of 1916, with Federal Judge John C. Pollack presiding. Stroud entered a plea of self-defense, in front of what would ultimately prove to be an unsympathetic jury. The trial lasted for only a few weeks. On May 22, 1916, Stroud was sentenced to death by hanging, to be carried out on July 21 st, 1916. However, the judgment was successfully appealed. That appeal began what would be a series of trials and petitions to have his death sentence reduced to life imprisonment. Stroud’s mother Elizabeth hired two prominent attorneys and a skilled psychiatrist – but her attempts ultimately proved futile in the courtroom. On March 5, 1920, by order of Federal Judge James Lewis, Robert F. Stroud was sentenced to be executed on April 23, 1920. The hanging was to be performed at Leavenworth, and the prison began construction of his gallows.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth Stroud did not lose hope and launched large-scale campaigns to save her son’s life. She enlisted the help of women’s groups in letter-writing campaigns addressed to President Woodrow Wilson and the First Lady, hoping to secure an executive order commuting his sentence to penalty without death. Stroud’s mother was unrelenting and passionately lobbied the White House to review her son’s case. She would base her line of reasoning on the argument that her son suffered from mental illness and that this was a genetic trait that ran in her family. Stroud’s older sister had been institutionalized and his mother cited case histories in which other convicts had been granted leniency for mental disorders.
Her valiant efforts proved successful; only five days before he was scheduled to hang, Stroud was issued a commutation by the President of the United States. It read:
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT KNOWN, THAT I, WOODROW WILSON, President of the United States of America, in consideration of the premises, drivers other good and sufficient reasons me thereunto moving, do hereby commute the sentence of Robert F. Stroud to imprisonment for life in a penitentiary to be designated by the Attorney General of the United States. Signed April 15, 1920, by President Wilson.
The commutation was a tough blow for prison officials. The official notebook of the Alcatraz Warden noted:
Rumors were that Stroud was to serve his life sentence in Solitary Confinement. There is no wording, phrases, or riders attached to indicate just how the subject is to serve while confined for the remainder of his life. Such detail was apparently left to the Attorney General or Warden of the Penitentiary.
With no specific direction from the courts or the President, Stroud would have to serve his time under the terms of his original sentence, which stated that he should remain in solitary confinement until his execution. The Warden issued a single statement to reporters that read: “Stroud is to be kept in the segregated ward during his sentence, which is for life. He will never be permitted to associate with other prisoners, and will be allowed the customary half hour each day for exercise...” It was a perfectly clear and concise message to the public – Stroud would pay his debt. But some recall that Bob Stroud actually embraced the idea of being kept out of the general prison population.
Stroud’s fragile family unit began to dissolve after the trial was over. His parents divorced and his father moved to California to look for work. Marcus Stroud was now leading an eccentric lifestyle in vaudevillian shows as Marcus the Great, performing a successful Houdini-like escape act, in which he made use of skills learned from his brother. He formally changed his name to Lawrence Gene Marcus and traveled throughout the country with his act.
Now confined to a small and dimly-lit solitary cell, Stroud worked to better himself through correspondence courses and also took to painting and sketching. There is little documentation regarding his activities prior to beginning his bird research. Stroud’s biographer Tom Gaddis wrote that Elizabeth had taken a twelve-dollar-a-week job sewing satin casket linings and that Bob started to craft holiday cards to help supplement his mother’s income. It was also Gaddis who best captured the beginning of Stroud’s interest in birds. He claimed that Stroud found a baby sparrow in the isolation yard during a storm and brought the bird back to his cell to nurture it. Gaddis wrote that Bob would place a sock over the warm light bulb in his cell to create a warm bed, and would feed crushed cockroaches to the sparrow with a toothpick.
Before Stroud began studying birds, he hand-painted holiday cards to help support his mother.
Stroud was persistent with his new hobby, and persuaded the warden to allow him to keep and breed birds in his solitary cell. He slowly grew obsessed with this newfound interest, and began collecting materials to make cages, and rearranging his cell in efforts to accommodate his birds. Visitors to Leavenworth were often paraded past Stroud’s cell, and were shown the circus-style tricks performed by his small canaries. The guards however were not impressed by his antics. Former Alcatraz Captain Phil Bergen stated that the majority of the custodial staff at Leavenworth felt some level of resentment toward the prison administration for allowing Stroud the freedom to breed canaries.
Stroud launched into a new project of assembling a small laboratory in his cell, soon after some of his birds fell ill and died. He had become completely consumed with his birds and their needs. He maintained an observation journal to help understand how the various diseases affected his ever-growing canary population. As well as documenting his observations in detail, he began experimenting with birdseed blends and other pharmaceutically based mixtures. Stroud was allowed to subscribe to a variety of bird magazines, and wrote remarkably detailed theories based on his observations.