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.

John Stadig and the Delco Generator (based on information from Darrell McBreairty's Alcatraz Eel)

John Stadig was a very smart young man, and like his grandfather and many of his uncles, whose family straddled the Maine/New Brunswick border, machines were not a mystery to him. Unlike them however, John wasn’t fond of steady work, but for pocket money he’d make his talents available to what neighbours in St. Francis, Maine could afford to own machinery. If something didn’t run, he’d fix it and people would pay him. Sometimes though when John was broke and there was nothing broken to fix, he felt the need to make his own opportunities. One of his customers was a barber named George Lausier who owned a building where he kept his barber shop, a bowling alley and a pool hall. In the late 1920s there was no electrical grid running wires into the small towns, so in George’s basement he had what was called a Delco Light Generator, which had an internal combustion engine with an exhaust pipe going out the back of the building.

            One day John was strolling up the dusty road with one hand in his trousers and the other eating an apple that he’d plucked from someone’s back yard, when the hand in his pocket found that he was short for a pack of cigarettes. He ducked around back of George’s place and shoved the uneaten half of the apple into the exhaust pipe of George’s Delco, waited a while and then came back out front to stroll nonchalantly past the barber shop. George was there in the dim room with a half groomed customer, and looking rather flustered. When he saw John walking by he smiled with relief. “John”, he said “Boy am I glad to see you! My Delco stalled and I got no lights!”

“Gee, that’s too bad Mr. Lausier” John said sympathetically “Let me have a look.” He went down to the basement and made some noise around the machine for a while, then he came back up and said “Mr. Lausier, I want you to go downstairs and try to start it when I tell you. I’m going out back, so I can hear what it’s doing if it turns over.” So John went over to the pipe, use his jack-knife to pry out the apple and then whooped down to George through the basement window, “Okay Mr. Lausier, give’er a try!” Of course it started right away, George gratefully gave John a few dollars for his expert help and he was on his way. It paid in those days to know something about machines, just like it cost some people, like George Lausier, to know nothing about them.

John Stadig and the Trip to Cook County Jail (Adapted from research gathered by Darrel McBreairty and published in Alcatraz Eel: the John Stadig Files)

   John Stadig was in quite a predicament. Handcuffed in the marshal’s wagon on the way to the Cook County Jail it looked like he was headed back to prison. He didn’t seem as worried though as one would think he should have been. In the van with him were five guys, all crooks and four women, all prostitutes, one of whom was sitting on the lap of the man to his left, who just happened to be Stadig’s partner, Harry Abramowski, known to the fuzz as Richard Adams. Why was she on his lap? Well, the van was crowded and when the deputies loaded them all in, that’s where Hazel Snowdie plunked herself down. What did they care? Let Adams have a little thrill on his way to stir. He wouldn’t be seeing a woman for a long time once he got there.

   As Hazel giggled and squirmed on Harry’s lap, Stadig smiled as from the corner of his eye he watched his pal lean forward and pull a bobby-pin from her hair with his teeth. Harry drew it into his mouth and hid it there until Deputy Glaubke, the only guard in the back with them, turned his head to look out the small window on the door, then Abramowski whispered for Hazel to slide forward while he dropped the pin into his cuffed hands. Hazel then moved back up against him and he went to work on the lock. Within seconds his hands were free.

   At that moment, as the wagon reached the corner of Racine Avenue and Jackson Boulevard the van lurched to a sudden stop as a small boy was knocked down by a black Ford Coupe which had now stopped in the middle of the street in front of the prisoner wagon as the driver got out to check on the boy. The arrest-wagon driver, Deputy Edward Smith shouted back to Glaubke what had happened and as he and the other man in front, Deputy Ben Goldberg got out to investigate, Glaubke opened the back door to get a better look. That’s when Henry passed the bobby-pin to John Stadig, who was quickly free of the cuffs. They both rushed Glaubke, knocked him down, jumped out of the van and dashed down the street.

   Glaubke shouted as he got up, Smith and Goldberg ran to him. Seeing what had happened, Deputy Smith trained his weapon on the remaining prisoners who were still in the van while Glaubke and Goldberg, weapons drawn and firing, chased after the runners. Several bullets whizzed around Stadig and Abramowski but they had quite a head start and and the distance made them harder targets. Every shot missed and the act of shooting slowed down their pursuit.

   Meanwhile at the front of the van, with a word from the driver of the Coupe the young boy on the concrete miraculously jumped to his feet and smiled gratefully as the driver tossed him a silver dollar. As he skipped away, the driver got back in the Model B and sped off in the direction that John Stadig and Harry Abramowski had run. He picked them up a few blocks away.

Joh Stadig on McNeil Island (based on information from Darrell McBreairty's Alcatraz Eel)

   John Stadig was serving six years in the federal prison on McNeil Island, Washington for counterfeiting United States currency. It was a month into his sentence, and since he’d so far been a model prisoner he’d earned the privilege of shoveling gravel in the pit of the north yard. A one-and-a-half-ton green Fargo dump-truck driven by prison trustee Charlie Powell, was just backing up to be re-loaded, and until it was in position the other prisoners had nothing to do, so Stadig was there with the rest of the cons, just leaning on his shovel in the pacific-northwest drizzle of mid-April. As the truck lurched to a stop John turned to the convict next to him and whispered “It’s now or never Mack.” They both dropped their shovels. Mack Smith, who was in for robbing a post office in Cheyenne, opened the driver’s side door of the Fargo, grabbed Powell by the arm and yanked him down from the cab and onto the ground where his body splayed into a cloud of dust. Smith climbed inside and slid over to the passenger side while Stadig quickly jumped behind the wheel and closed the door as he shifted it into gear and stepped hard on the gas. The truck thundered towards the locked gate of tower number six and smashed through as bullets rained down on the roof of the cab from above. The vehicle charged the second gate and managed to break through but the second impact caused it to stall just outside of the fence. This gave the guards a chance to steady their rifles before the inmates made their desperate dash from the cab to the nearby forest. Stadig, with his longer legs, was ahead of Smith, but when he heard one of the guards’ rifle shots followed by Mack’s high-pitched grunt and the sound of him thumping to the ground behind him, he knew he hadn’t just tripped. He couldn’t turn around but just had to run faster, while Mack’s pained voice behind him shouted “Run John! Run!”  He began sprinting from side to side to make himself a harder target. The woods seemed miles away and he felt like he was running in slow motion, though he’d probably never run so fast in his twenty-six years. He was surprised to find himself reminded at that moment, even as bullets were making small dust explosions around his feet, of all the times he’d run away from school whenever the teacher’s back was turned back in St. Francis, Maine. He remembered dashing each of those days toward a line of trees, much like the ones he saw now, but those trees lined the St. John River, and he was running then to cross over to Canada where he could visit his mother who lived there. That was freedom in those days, but that was more than a thousand cigarettes ago and John felt like he could taste his lungs now as they gasped a barking protest at how far away those bushes still were; his teeth that ached from sucking air, and his chest that felt like it was being dented from inside by a hammer, both agreed with that complaint. But as another bullet zinged and then ricocheted off of a rock behind him, he was surprised to discover that he’d made it to the trees, and was safe, for the moment.

   Now that John had a moment to clear his mind he could ask himself, “What the hell were you thinking?” The plan had been to race the truck to the ocean, find a boat, and make it into Puget Sound before the guards knew what hit them. If they could have reached the open water they would have been harder to find, since the prison only had five vessels for searching right off the bat. After dark they could have made their way to some remote and unlit stretch of the Washington coastline. They’d even agreed that if they couldn’t locate a craft they would’ve been willing to attempt the swim to the mainland.

   But to say the least, things didn’t go smoothly. They not only didn’t achieve the shore, but now there was no longer any “they” at all. Mack was either dead or back in custody and John Stadig was alone as he ran deeper into the woods. It was going to be very difficult to make it from trees to ocean on foot because he’d have to expose himself to possible gunfire again. The prison probably had at least fifty armed guards headed for the forest, and suddenly he knew what it felt like to be one of the deer he and his friends used to hunt back home in northern Maine and New Brunswick. He’d just have to find a place to hide and hope they didn’t find him. Maybe after dark he could get to the beach, though probably not. With the original plan flubbed his chances were very slim.

   He was deep in the grove now but could still hear filtering through the trees behind him the chaos his escape had caused. The emergency lock-down siren was screaming continuously, the muffled shouts of guards and the noise from the engines of vehicles leaving the gate caught his ear as the search began. His ears picked up the ragged snore of handsaws to the beat of clanging hammers, and he guessed they were making desperate repairs on the fence he’d smashed.

   On the edge of a clearing he found a thick patch of blackberry bushes and plunged into their midst. As he ducked and crawled to get to their thickest growth he was wishing they were in season, because one way or the other he was going to be missing dinner tonight. He saw nothing there to eat and if they did catch him he’d be in the “hole” without food for quite a while.

   Once he’d found a hiding place and settled in, there was nothing to do but to think about what had led him to this point.  Why would a man in his mid-twenties who could have gotten parole in less than four years try to escape from prison? He should have been able to put up with fourty months or so of incarceration, but he didn’t think he could. He thought about how his brother Emerson or his half-brother Jonsie could have probably handled a sentence like his on their heads. They’d worked every day in the machine shop, fixing cars from morning till night since they were teenagers. They were used to routine, but John had always seen their life as a caged one, so for him penitentiary time was something worse. For John Stadig, the big house was hell and he was sure he couldn’t make it even two years, let alone four.

   John could now hear the roar of boats as they slapped the choppy waters around the island in search of him. Listening to those vessels reminded him of the river-craft he’d motorized a few years back in Maine. He’d done it on his own time in his cousin’s shop, hoisted the engines out of old cars, adapted them with propellers and installed them in rowboats for the purpose of pushing rafts of lumber to shore against the strong currents of the St. John River. Even at that very moment as he crouched in the bushes on the west coast, those two boats might still be ramming logs back east.

   From a very early age John Stadig had shown a raw talent for working with machinery and electronics of every kind. He felt that he’d learned more as a boy from tinkering in Raymond’s shop after school than he’d ever learned in his eight years of yawning at the blackboard. He also had a genius for invention, which he’d first discovered when he noticed that Model “T” Fords couldn’t go frontward up a steep hill because the incline put the gas tank below the engine. That’s why in the old days people would have to back the cars up, turn them around at the top of the hill and then go down. John came up with a simple pump and hose system that corrected the problem. Not that it mattered though to anyone who owned anything but an old Model “T”, because by the time he’d come up with a solution, the Model “A” was in circulation and the design flaw had been corrected.

   He’d arrived at plenty of other inventions and improvements for tire pumps, radios, generators and wind turbines, but once he’d reached his twenties he thought he was really onto something when he started getting the inspiration for a better airplane engine. His dream was to enroll at the Tri State College of Engineering in Indiana to learn how to draft his ideas, but money was a problem. The Great Depression was in full swing and he could never get work as a mechanic for long enough to save the tuition. In 1931 he spent several months traveling to Montreal, New York and finally Wichita, trying to get a bite on his designs from various airplane builders. But it was not a time for financing new ideas, it was more a time to hold on for dear life and ride out the storm.

   It seemed the only thing that paid in the 1930s was crime, but John Stadig couldn’t bring himself to threaten someone with a gun in order to rob a bank. He’d discovered though, a few years before, that besides his mechanical and electronic skills he also had a talent for chemistry and photography. During these hard times counterfeiting didn’t even seem like a crime. The government and the banks had thrown millions of people into poverty and desperation. Those who’d been rich were throwing themselves out of skyscrapers, while folk who’d been poor but independent were now starving and lining up for hand-outs. But according to lawmakers it wasn’t the bankers who were the criminals, but the poor people who tried to make ends meet by bucking the system just a little. Yes, John had copied a few bank notes, but he wasn’t trying to get rich. He’d just wanted to help his mother with the mortgage and pay for his education.

   While John was reflecting on his past, Finch Archer, the warden of McNeil Island was thinking about where John Stadig was at that moment. He was fairly certain his men had him surrounded. Every available guard, with rifles, machine guns and pistols at the ready, had been sent to beat through the heavy brush in search of the convict. Given Stadig’s history of escaping custody, the powers that be would say he shouldn’t have been allowed near a truck. If he managed to avoid capture it would have been embarrassing for both Archer and his prison, so as an extra incentive a reward of fifty dollars was offered to whoever found him first. That same prize was dangled by radio to the police on the mainland. This was big money in hard times for a cop or a guard.

   Stadig managed to shiver in hiding through the cold, damp night while flashlights darted all around him. He held his breath when boots crunched down on twigs close to his hiding place. His stomach was empty throughout the next day, and his body was stiff from curling himself up as tight and small and still as he could. As the second afternoon came to a close he was starting to hope that he’d be captured again just so he could move and eat, even if only in a dark cell with a piece of stale bread once a day. That crust was beginning to seem more and more delicious the longer he lay there listening to his   stomach on the rough ground.

   About thirty hours after his escape, at around 7:45 in the evening, a guard found John Stadig crouching in the bushes on the north-east corner of the island. He sighed with relief, surrendered, and was immediately led to a dark cell for the next sixteen days as punishment. During that time he ate mostly bread and water, though Christian charity compelled the prison to give him a full meal on each of his two Sundays in the hole.

   Two years were added to his sentence.

Alcatraz (based on information from Darrel McBreairty's Alcatraz Eel: the John Stadig Files)

   It was during the time of the California gold rush that the United States first got the idea to build a fortress on Alcatraz Island. The reason was to protect its newfound wealth from peg-legged pirates or whoever else they were afraid was going to rob their coffers. One imagines President Zachary Taylor at the time as some crotchety old bent over prospector rattling his fist at the Pacific horizon and shouting in a dusty voice, “Our gold! We can’t let ‘em take our gold!”

   It turned out after all that no one came to try to un-stuff the lumpy mattresses of the United States government. The fortress on Pelican Island sat uselessly for two decades until the Civil War broke out. At that point the army decided it would be an ideal place for holding captured rebels, surrounded as it was by the spine-eating cold and the swim fighting currents of San Francisco Bay. But it was during the Spanish-American War that they raised it to its full, dark potential, when four hundred and fifty POWs were crammed inside of its walls.

   By 1934 the United States Army, with no wars to keep it rich, could no longer afford to maintain the Alcatraz Military Prison. The Department of Justice however was prospering at the time from the increase of crime caused by the mass poverty of the great depression, and they took it over. They wired it for electricity; they flooded every utility tunnel with cement, and fortified every cell and cellblock with modern steel. With all the money they had to blow on renovations they decided to get especially fancy with the ceiling of the cafeteria, where they installed tear gas canisters that could be triggered from the outside. However, they didn’t take it into consideration the fact that the guards would never leave the dining area. So if a riot were to occur, the teargas would also be dropped on them.

   Alcatraz was designed physically to be one of the strongest prisons in existence and administratively to be the harshest and least forgiving of any other correctional facility. No crime committed on the outside world would get someone sentenced to Alcatraz. To end up there you had to already be a prisoner somewhere else, and a bad one. Alcatraz was where you were sent when no other prison could handle you.

   Though there was some access to the prison library at Alcatraz, inmates were not allowed to read or hear about current events through newspapers or radios. There were also no movies, no plays, and no entertainment of any other kind. The intention of such extreme isolation was to make “the Rock” an island of men who were dead to the world. It was crucial to the administration that all 212 men understand that whether by serving their time and being released, or by staying for the rest of their lives, Alcatraz was the last prison they would ever know.

                At one o’clock in the morning on January 14^th, 1936 the Alcatraz prisoners were woken up by the painful groans of their fellow inmate, Jack Allen. He was moved to isolation so as not to disturb anyone, but his non-verbal wrenching complaints filtered through the walls and held everyone’s attention throughout the night. No one came to check on him because the doctor had seen him a few hours before and believed that his complaint was not serious. Past examinations over time had led the doctor to conclude that Allen was a hypochondriac. Seven hours later he was rushed to surgery, but two days later he died. This was the first civilian death in the history of Alcatraz and the prison population was moved to a seething anger over this event.

In April 1936 a prisoner named Joe Bowers, after three months in the dungeon, had gradually earned back enough trust to get a job at the prison incinerator, where he’d been working for the last few weeks. Among the things he was supposed to burn were leftover scraps from the kitchen, which caused seagulls to visit him when he brought the food out. On April 26 when Bowers came out and the gulls descended to meet him, he upended some garbage cans and piled them up to form a stairway to the top of the fence. Then he climbed it without trying to get over, but rather simply stood there, reached into his pockets and pulled out bread to toss to the gulls. It wasn’t until the guards started firing that, in fear and confusion, he began to climb down the other side of the fence. He reached the ledge but decided to climb back up again and was trying to get back over the fence when one of the bullets hit him. He hung by his hands with his legs dangling when another shot tore into his body, causing him to fall lifeless down the cliff and into the ocean. This event solidified in the minds of the inmates that Alcatraz was not just a prison, but a place of inhuman cruelty.

John Stadig at Alcatraz (Based on information from Darrel McBreairty's Alcatraz Eel: the John Stadig Files)

On August 4, 1934, because of his attempt to escape from the McNeil Island Prison, John Stadig was transferred to Alcatraz. He was one of the first fifty civilian inmates to be sent there.

   As the prison ferry crossed the seething waters of the bay, he could see the Rock taking form in the grey fog as they drew closer. With barely a tree to be seen, it foreboded a sense that his next several years would be lifeless. At the dock, while being taken from the boat, he turned his head out over the water and could see the Golden Gate Bridge catching sunlight in the distance, even as it began to rain on Alcatraz.

   He was put into a van and driven up the hill to his new home, then marched into the basement to be processed. He was taken to a large shower room, commanded to strip and wash, but had to wear the stare of an armed guard the whole time. Then he was told to walk through an ankle deep pool of greenish disinfectant. It stung slightly as he sloshed his way across to line up with his fellow new cons at the other side.

   A prison trustee, who’d been standing in the background, picked up a metal bowl and walked towards them. Stadig wondered at first if they were going to be handed out snacks while standing there naked, but then as the prisoner came closer John picked up the strong odour of mothballs and he could see that the bowl was filled with some kind of blue ointment. Then one by one each arrival was commanded to step forward, while the convict approached him and, with a wooden paddle, smeared the stuff into his pubic hair and armpits. Stadig watched with pity as the senior inmate performed his duty, and wondered if this would be the result of good behaviour on Alcatraz: the “privilege” of dabbing camphorated salve on the balls of other prisoners.

   They were told to remain in line.  Stadig suddenly heard the authoritarian sound of a metal door shutting above him. He looked up, and at the top of a stairway there was a prematurely bald man in a white smock. He wore round wire glasses and looked something like a mad scientist from a movie. As the odd looking man descended the stairs, he was carrying, with strange delicacy, a large aluminum bowl, and once he reached the bottom, Stadig could see that it was filled with the fingers of rubber gloves.                

   He put the bowl on a table, turned to face the new prisoners, and then pointed his index finger at the ceiling. Stadig looked up for a second until he realized the bald man was just positioning his finger so he could slip on one of the gloves. He then stepped around behind them as the first man in line was commanded by a screw to bend over and touch his toes. The mad scientist then shoved his finger up the con’s ass for what seemed like a long time, to probe for smuggled items. After that he walked back to the table, discarded the used glove, took a new one and went back behind. This repeated until the rectums of every one of the fresh fish had been thoroughly explored.

   Stadig was then given a grey, one-size-fits-all heavy woolen jumpsuit. Luckily he was tall, because it looked like a deflated balloon on some of the cons beside him. His uniform had the number forty-six sewn large on the chest and at the same height on the back. Later on he learned that the numbers were big so they made easy targets if they had to be shot at from the towers.

   They were then told that the next stop would be the mess hall. The good news was that they could pile as much food as they wanted onto their plates. The bad news was that if they didn’t eat every bit of it they would be put in the hole on nothing but bread and water for one day.

   After the meal Stadig was introduced to his cell, which was about two meters by two and a half meters.  The ceiling was two and a half meters above him with a twenty-watt bulb at the center. He noticed there was no switch to turn it on or off.

   That night Stadig was kept awake by the voices of other inmates. Conversations between cells were forbidden, but several cons were raving in their sleep and calling out through their submerged pain all night long. As nights turned to weeks he came to recognize each voice and could hear their desperation growing, their sanity slipping away as time moved on and on inside the unchanging machine in which they were unmoving parts.

   As if to add percussion to that symphony of insane voices, Stadig could also hear the sound of gunshots almost every night after the lights went out. That first time, he wondered if someone had tried to escape, but he found out soon that except for Sundays the guards would pass the graveyard shift by using dummies for target practice.     Afterwards they would place the soft mannequins, with bullet holes in the chest and head, in the walkways so the prisoners could see them on the way to breakfast.

   After finally getting to sleep in the wee hours, Stadig was startled at six in the morning by what sounded like a fire alarm. He would come to know that bell as the only timepiece the prisoners at Alcatraz would have. He was told that there would be another bell in twenty minutes, and if he was not dressed by that time any privileges that day such as the yard or library would be revoked. Since he was not allowed to wear a watch he had to guess the span of twenty minutes.

   That first morning turned out to be Stadig’s shaving day. He was instructed to put a matchbox on the shelf just outside of the bars of his cell in which a guard would place a razor blade. He was told he had to finish shaving and have the blade back in the box in three minutes or else he’d be thrown in solitary. The shaving soap was cheap, and the sink in his cell only gave cold water, but he finished his shave. He was on his way to put the blade back in the matchbox when he heard a loud tussle going on in the corridor. He looked out and saw one of his fellow new arrivals being wrestled to the floor because he’d refused to shave. Four guards held him down, while the fifth shaved him without soap or water.

   Next the cells were opened and every prisoner had to step out to stand and be counted. After breakfast there was another count, and every thirty minutes no matter whether in the yard or the library or on work detail. No matter what they were doing the prisoners had to stop to be counted when the bell rang.

   There was an hour of free time in the yard before they were sent to work, which was mostly doing the laundry of local soldiers or cleaning the prison. This lasted until lunch and after that they had to work again until 4:30. On weekends they were allowed yard time instead of work. Dinner every day was at 5:00, and then they were all in their cells from 5:30 until lights out at 9:30. John Stadig was lucky that he could read, because that was all there was to do during those last four hours of the day. Many prisoners were either illiterate or so barely competent at reading that the attempt would be a source of frustration for them.

   After about three weeks the routine settled in so completely that any slight variation was a source of excitement for John Stadig. One night he noticed that there were more guards on duty and that they seemed more tense than usual. There were rumours that slowly got passed from cell to cell that night through the pipe tapping code, and sure enough, the next morning at breakfast, looking very small in his too big jump-suit, sitting and eating in the mess hall just like any other con, was Al Capone.

   Yard time was a precious part of the day. To be out under the open sky at least gave the prisoners’ senses a little freedom. One rare sunny day in early September when Stadig was outside with the other inmates, he walked to where a patch of sunlight was warming a wall and leaned against it. He lit up a cigarette and watched the other prisoners toss a ball around. At that moment he suddenly felt tranquil and content, and even thought that maybe his time at Alcatraz wouldn’t be so bad after all. It was just then that a guard approached to tell him to step away from the wall. “Why?” Stadig asked, “Will I hurt it?” The guard reported him for insolence and also complained that Stadig had given him “several threatening and defiant looks”. Because of this he lost yard privileges for a month.

   As autumn arrived and the weather got colder and wetter, John Stadig and his fellow prisoners had to spend more and more time indoors dealing with the boredom brought on by inactivity. They could accept for the most part that they were living in a cage and that their lives were being mechanized, but one thing they considered unfair at Alcatraz was not being able to at least look at a magazine or see a film from time to time. Stadig and some others began circulating a petition to ask for some of these small pleasures to be occasionally allowed. The warden was angry that the convicts in his prison thought they had any right to question his authority. He could often be heard during the next few weeks shouting to one of his aides or into the phone: “Nobody is going to run this prison except me!” He found out which prisoners started the petition rolling and put them in solitary confinement for three days. John Stadig was not among them.

   After a month of resistance though, the warden relented. Perhaps he’d given in to pressure from his superiors in the California Department of Corrections, but the first movie ever shown at Alcatraz was The Thin Man, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, on Thanksgiving of 1934.

John Stadig's Escape from the Train to Alcatraz (Based on information from Darrel McBreairty's Alcatraz Eel)

           On December 2, 1934, John Stadig was taken from Alcatraz to Oregon to stand trial for additional charges to those for which he was already serving time. The town of Portland, still reeling from the aftermath of the waterfront strike, was hungry for news that wasn’t about unemployment and politics. The press flocked to the courthouse to get a statement from the man who’d come to be known as “the collegiate counterfeiter”. Back when Stadig was arrested on New Years Eve, he’d impressed reporters in Frisco with his educated manner and his claim to have a degree in chemical engineering. The reality was that although he was a genius in many ways, Stadig only had a sixth grade education. On the steps of the courthouse on December 5, he boasted to the press that he would escape, as he’d done in the past.

On December 7, on a train headed back to California, Stadig, in the company of a U.S. marshal and a guard, sat quietly sulking over the result of his trial. He would serve an extra seven and a half years for his crimes, and that time would be spent at Alcatraz.

At 5:58 p.m., about an hour north of San Francisco, just after the guard, Al Davidson went to the washroom; Stadig knocked Marshal John Watson down and jumped on one of the seats.  He kicked and shattered both panes of a window and then leapt head first through the jagged hole.

Davidson came back just in time to see Stadig’s feet go through the window. He pulled the emergency cord to stop the train as Marshall Watson rose from the floor and drew his gun. He shoved his arms, head and shoulders through the small broken window and looked back. It was dusk, but he could see the outline of Stadig stumbling off into the brush. He fired his gun three times at the receding shape as the train lurched to a stop, then he and Davidson went out to find Stadig. With just two of them though, and having no flashlights to cut the darkness, they gave up after eleven minutes. Watson quickly found a payphone and called the police in nearby Richmond so as to round up some help for a thorough search.

            Within an hour, men from all branches of law enforcement gathered in west Contra Costa County and began to search the Black Hills with flashlights for John Stadig. On the rocks that lined the railroad tracks they found a trail of blood which they followed for about one and a half kilometers until it disappeared near some unused buildings on the outskirts of Richmond. Detectives from the FBI concluded that Stadig’s escape had been planned and that someone had been waiting with a car to carry him away from that point of rendezvous.

When daylight came, however, this theory was proven false, as they picked up Stadig’s trail running through the desert brush into the San Pablo Canyon. They searched through the day, then when darkness fell, more electric torches lit up the rugged terrain as they relentlessly continued their quest. The next day the authorities received a call from a rancher who thought he might have spotted Stadig on his property. On the day after that a cattleman near San Pablo reported that a man had knocked on his door and asked if he could spare some bandages, disinfectant and matches. The beggar had explained that he’d been hitchhiking but had fallen off the back of a truck on the gravel road. 

Early Sunday morning searchers discovered what was left of a campfire along with some bloody bandages. On Monday morning bloodhounds sniffed the dressings and began to follow Stadig’s scent. Just before noon on the same day another rancher reported that a weak and weary man with skinned hands and knees came to his door, begging for breakfast.

            On Tuesday the Justice Department moved in to take over the search. Perhaps it was sour grapes, but around this time the local police told the press that John Stadig had probably made it through the dragnet by hitching out of the Bay area.

On Wednesday night a rainstorm hit the San Pablo region, so if Stadig was still hiding in the canyon it would nearly erase his trail.

            On the Friday evening of December 14th, John Stadig stumbled up to a farmhouse in Concord, California. The owner opened the door to a man weak from hunger and cold and begging for food. He had two black eyes, cuts on his hands and his knees and he was wearing muddy clothes stained with blood. The farmer recognized him from a news photo and invited him in for a meal. While Stadig was eating, the man called the police who only took twenty minutes to get there. Stadig saw them through the kitchen window and dashed out the back door, but he came face to face with more armed men. He started running in another direction, but froze when someone fired a warning shot. He then nervously put his hands in the air and surrendered to the posse of deputy sheriffs.

            The arresting deputies tried to get him to confirm that he was John Stadig, but he insisted they had the wrong man. Only after being taken to the county jail and the sheriff’s interview did he relax and admit that he was John Stadig. He was relieved that his week of excruciating, terrifying, almost sleepless freedom in the cold northern California desert was over. He had lost fifteen pounds, and his body was weak from loss of blood. He collapsed gratefully on the bed of his cell and slept for fourteen hours, only to wake up the next day when they came to take him back to prison.

Upon returning to Alcatraz, Stadig was given a check up and the doctor assessed that it was squeezing through the broken glass window of the train that had sliced his hands and ripped into his forehead and knees. After receiving medical treatment for these injuries, Stadig was tossed shoeless into the dungeon.  His cell was pitch black and damp. He could hear the sound of water dripping and it gave him an urge to urinate. He moved forward till he found a wall and began groping his way around in search of the toilet. Everywhere he placed his hands he could feel water running down the walls. After touching his way around the cell John realized that there was no toilet, but what he did find were chains hanging low from the walls. They were thick and rusted, with cold manacles open and waiting to be snapped shut over a prisoner’s wrists and ankles. They’d probably been there since the Spanish American War and Stadig thought himself lucky that he hadn’t been chained with them. Maybe he would have been if not for the injured hand that the prison had just paid someone to bandage.

 At noon the guard came with Stadig’s breakfast, lunch and dinner, which consisted of two slices of bread and some water. He ate while listening to the rats that were scurrying nearby and sometimes he could see their eyes reflecting what miniscule light that had somehow filtered down into his cell.