Murdered by Alcatraz (based on information found in Darrell McBreairty's Alcatraz Eel)

On June 1, 1935, John Stadig refused his labour detail and asked to be taken to solitary or even the hole rather than to work where they’d put him. For the next three weeks he was in solitary confinement on a restricted diet.

            On June 25 at 5:20 a.m. a guard was making the rounds when he noticed the inmate in cell 420 was lying under his blankets and had them pulled up over his face. The guard was suspicious because Stadig did not appear to be sleeping and his body movements implied some sort of action was taking place. He entered the cell and yanked the blankets away to find them stained with blood that was flowing from Stadig’s arm.

Although the first investigation of  Stadig’s cell discovered a suicide note addressed to his brother Emerson, they couldn’t find what he’d used to cut himself. They’d at first thought he’d opened his vein with nail clippers and simply tossed them away before the guard arrived, but it was later discovered that he’d used the blade of a pencil sharpener.

John had been immediately taken to the hospital but his injuries were not severe enough to require more than a few stitches. His action however did bring about an interview with the the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Twitchell who concluded that Stadig’s ideation seemed normal in tempo and content, but that he was ego-centric, conceited and boastful. He assessed that Stadig’s I.Q. was probably about 124 and he concluded that the fact that he did not succeed in committing suicide fitted with a tendency in his life to start things without finishing them. He believed Stadig was a compulsive liar not only to others but also to himself and that this self-deception had led him to convince himself that he wanted to end it all. He thought that Stadig’s personality type would compel him to repeat this behaviour, and because of this he would be in prison for a very long time. Dr. Twitchell predicted that once Stadig reached old age he would “calm down” and not have the energy to engage in such mischievous acts as trying to commit suicide.

            On a few occasions, during John’s time at Alcatraz he had sent letters of complaint in which he blamed specific people for his mistreatment there. In early December John sent a letter to his brother Emerson in which he communicated his inner pain and tried to explain why he had attempted suicide. He placed much of the blame on certain members of the prison administration as being responsible for his actions. The letter was intercepted and Stadig was written up for attempting to send a “scurrilous, defamatory, and libelous” letter, but since he admitted he was wrong he only lost mail privileges for the next two weeks.

            By early February, Stadig had lost a lot of weight and began complaining that the guards were plotting against him. He claimed he was constantly hearing nasty references to him in their conversations.

            On February 7 at 1:15 a.m. a guard found John Stadig in his cell in the process of trying to cut his wrists again with the blade of a pencil sharpener. Again he was taken to the infirmary where it was found that his wounds were once more not life threatening. He was placed in the hospital observation cell that the prisoners called “the bug cage” and when Dr. Twitchell came to see him Stadig said that he’d been sleeping with cotton in his ears so as not to hear people’s snide remarks. He told the doctor that despite the plugs he heard a nurse tell someone that if died he wouldn’t get a “wobbly’s funeral”.

            On March 21, after breakfast, Stadig again attempted suicide, this time with a fork that he’d concealed near his bed. It was a mystery how such a utensil had gotten into his room since only spoons were allowed in that section, but it was assumed that another inmate had smuggled it in for him.

            By the start of April, John began to feel like maybe he could do his time and asked for a work assignment. They gave him a job in the hospital, but he found it monotonous and claimed that it made him feel more isolated than when he was alone in his cell. They switched him to the library but after three days he decided he couldn’t make it and asked to go back in isolation. The warden was worried that Stadig’s request for solitude meant that he was going to try suicide again, so he just had him put in the hospital to save a trip.

            On May 28 at 11:00 p.m. the guards heard a crash of glass in Stadig’s room and found that he’d used a chair to smash a window. They stopped him before he could pick up one of the shards and he was moved to a windowless room. Dr. Twitchell’s response was that Stadig was only trying to get attention so as to feel special and recommended that he be treated just like any other prisoner.

            On June 13, John was released from the hospital but refused to go back to his cell. He demanded to be put in isolation because he considered it an honour to be among the others confined there and that unless he was taken there he would refuse to work, eat or obey any orders. He also demanded the deputy warden be notified immediately and when he spoke to him he argued that he needed solitary for two months to rest. The deputy warden insisted that he do what he was told, but he refused, so he was put in solitary on a restricted diet.

            On July 2 they moved John Stadig from solitary to isolation and allowed him one full meal a day.

            On July 20 at 6:00 p.m. a guard discovered Stadig bleeding in his cell after having climbed the bars and stretched to obtain the light bulb from the ceiling, broken it and used it to cut his left wrist. He had lost a pint of blood by the time he was found.

Dr. Twitchell’s assessment continued to be that Stadig had no intention of really killing himself, but was simply trying to get noticed, or perhaps trying get seen as insane so that he would be transferred to a less secure prison for treatment. He thought that while Stadig did suffer from some degree of mental illness it was only a borderline case and if suddenly released from prison his symptoms would disappear even though his habitual leanings would put him right back in a cell. Assistant director Bixby, after reading Dr. Twitchell’s reports, disagreed with his assessment and argued that Stadig suffered from dementia praecox. He predicted that Stadig would either eventually succeed in committing suicide or he would become fully psychotic.

            A few days later John again expressed the desire to be put to work, but this didn’t last. By August 26 he had not eaten in four days and was extremely pale. 

            On September 10, after over a year scattered with suicide attempts it was finally decided to send John Stadig to a prison that had a psychiatric ward. On the evening of September 18 he was transported from Alcatraz to the train station in Oakland, California and arrived on September 21 at Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. 

            His listed possessions were one three-tooth bridge, a pair of eye-glasses and thirty manuscripts of his own writing. He was assigned to Mental Annex #3 which was supervised by inmate trustees from the non-psychiatric section of the prison.

            Three days later at 9:35 p.m. Stadig removed his mattress and pushed the bed to block the door of his cell. Then from the springs of the bed he twisted and snapped off a ten centimeter piece of steel wire which he tried to use to slash his wrists. As this did not produce the result he wanted he then broke one of the lenses from his eyeglasses and used the biggest piece to slash his left wrist in two places. Blood began to flow but not quickly enough so he drove the broken lens deep into the muscles of the right side of his throat successfully slicing and severing his jugular vein. After the guards finally managed to force their way through the blocked door they found prisoner number 49536, John Stadig on the floor, unconscious and in extreme shock. Minutes later he was dead. Hands that had invented so many things in his cousin’s workshop back in St. Francis, Maine; hands that had fixed and mischievously broken to fix again so many machines during his childhood and young adulthood in northern Maine and northern New Brunswick, had finally invented a way to die. And so the escape artist had actually finally escaped from both Alcatraz and Leavenworth in one week. He would have been eligible for parole on December 11, 1939. It may have appeared on the surface that he’d taken his own life but without a doubt John Stadig was murdered by Alcatraz.

            In filling out the official death record back in St. Francis, Maine, John Stadig’s half-brother Jonsie McLellan, under “occupation” said that his brother was a writer.