In September of 1921 Gardner was transferred to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, and he immediately fell into conflict with the prison administration. He was transferred to Atlanta in October of 1925 and in July of 1926, he attempted another daring escape. Gardner and four other inmates secured weapons and attempted to take hostages, but their plan failed, and Gardner was placed in a deep lockdown status where he would remain for several months.
Surprisingly, Gardner volunteered to be transferred to Alcatraz. He claimed that he wanted to go straight, and felt that this would bring him closer to friends and family. Following his unsuccessful escape, Gardner had finally acquiesced under the strict prison rules. He eventually earned the reputation of a model inmate, and was granted his request for transfer to what he would later call “Hellcatraz.” Gardner was destined to do hard time during his twenty-five month imprisonment at Alcatraz. Warden Johnston had assigned him to work in the Mat Factory, and he would later comment that Leavenworth and Atlanta were summer resorts compared to the Rock. He wrote:
The hopeless despair on the Rock is reflected in the faces and actions of almost all of the inmates. They seem to march about the island in a sort of hopelessness, helpless daze, and you can watch them progressively sinking down and down... On “the Rock” there are upwards of three hundred men. One hundred fifty will die there. Sometime – in ten, fifteen, twenty-five years – the others come out into the world. These, too, are dead; the walking dead. The men confined there, to all intents and purposes, are buried alive. In reality they are little more than animated cadavers – dead men who are still able to walk and talk. Watching those men from day to day slowly giving up hopes is truly a pitiful sight, even if you are one of them.
Gardner was transferred back to Leavenworth in 1936, and was finally released from prison in 1938. He drifted back to San Francisco, and set up an exhibition booth at the Golden Gate Pan Pacific Exposition on Treasure Island. Gardner recounted to patrons his murderous stories of violence and torture, and autographed his personal memoir entitled Hellcatraz.
Roy Gardner’s Hellcatraz.
Following his release from Alcatraz, Gardner worked as a guide on a San Francisco tour boat for a short period.
Using cyanide, sulfuric acid, and a bath towel, Gardner created his own makeshift gas chamber, and committed suicide by draping the bathroom sink with a towel and covering his head.
Gardner’s show, entitled Crime Doesn’t Pay, failed to draw large crowds, and it eventually closed. He then spent a brief period working as a narrator on a San Francisco tour boat, but was later forced to take employment as a baker in San Francisco.
Gardner eventually found himself with no friends and his wife had left him and remarried. He finally committed suicide in a small San Francisco hotel on January 10, 1940. Using cyanide, sulfuric acid and a bath towel, he draped the bathroom sink and covered his head, creating a makeshift gas chamber. On the door was a note warning the maid: “Do Not Open Door - Poison Gas - Call Police.” Gardner had also left the maid a small cash tip for cleaning out his belongings. His suitcase stood neatly in a corner of his room and the shower curtain was neatly folded across the floor to prevent any mess. He wrote a note to the San Francisco Call-Bulletin that read: “I’m old and tired and don’t care to continue the struggle. Please let me down as light as possible.”
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ALCATRAZ ESCAPES
Alcatraz was designed to be an “escape-proof” prison for the nation’s most hardened criminals, incorporating multiple layers of redundant safeguards to eliminate all possible routes of escape. The island’s size, location and topography were also ideal in this regard, as it lay accessible to the mainland, yet surrounded by icy waters and treacherous currents, with a barren rocky landscape that offered little cover for potential escapees. The prison buildings were constructed to enhance even further the natural inaccessibility of the site, and even the interior gun galleries were designed so that they could only be entered from outside of the prison perimeter. But despite the seemingly foolproof design of the prison, inmates were still able to identify weaknesses in the system, and some made it down to the shore and into the ice-cold water – never to be seen or heard from again...
ESCAPE ATTEMPT #1
Date:
April 27, 1936
Inmates:
Joseph Bowers
Location:
Incinerator Detail
Joseph Bowers
The first recorded escape on Alcatraz during its tenure as a Federal Penitentiary occurred on April 27, 1936. However, several historians consider the escape attempt by Joseph Bowers as a suicide rather than a conventional prison break. Joseph Bowers was among the first group to be transferred to Alcatraz from McNeil in 1934. In a report submitted on September 4, 1936, shortly after Bower’s arrival, Chief Medical Officer George Hess concluded: “He is a man of extremely low mentality upon which is superimposed an extremely ugly disposition, he is a custodial problem and will probably have to be dealt with by firm measures.”
Joseph Bowers was originally thought to have been born on February 18, 1897 in El Paso Texas (records would later show that he was of Austrian decent and held legal citizenship). He was thirty-eight years old when he arrived at Alcatraz as inmate AZ-210. From his birth onward, his life had been a fragmented model of instability. Bowers was born to circus performers and alleged to have been deserted by his parents at birth. He was raised by various people within the circus environment and although he was never given any formal schooling, he claimed to have learned to read and write from others in the circus. Bowers traveled the world extensively and he later asserted that he could read and write in six different languages. At age thirteen, Bowers decided to leave the circus and take employment as a seaman on a commercial schooner. In 1919 he was married in Russia, but he separated from his wife later that same year.
A neuro-psychiatric report written by Dr. Romney Ritchey at McNeil states that it was “believed” that Bowers had served in the German Army, but that he would not admit to this. There was significant circumstantial evidence to corroborate this however, as Bowers had suffered what appeared to be combat injuries. These included a lost testicle due to a bullet wound and a “bullet scar” on his chest. Bowers also claimed that at the age of twenty-five he had secured employment in Germany as an interpreter, making $350.00 per month. When it was discovered that he didn’t possess a valid passport or proof of citizenship, he was deported back to the U.S. to obtain documentary evidence of his birthplace. It was further recorded that he could not find any traces of his parents.
In 1928 Bowers was arrested for car theft in Oregon where he served ten months in jail. He was again arrested in Washington in 1930 for drunken driving, fined $75, and released. The Federal crime that would lead him to Alcatraz was committed in 1930, and it would garner him a mere $16.63. Bowers’ description of the crime, which he claimed he did not commit, was included in the neuropsychiatry summary by Dr. Ritchy of the McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington State. It is further worth noting that in 1938, Dr. Ritchy left McNeil Island to replace Dr. George Hess as Chief Medical Officer at Alcatraz. A pertinent section of Dr. Ritchey’s report on Bowers reads: