THE PRISON BAKERS sweated in the glare of the ovens, making bread for the hungry men of the honor farm. Since dawn, they'd prepared more than sixty loaves, and now the kitchen was redolent with the tang of yeast as the fresh bread cooled on the racks before slicing. A guard, armed but not very vigilant, patrolled the galley perimeter.
One of the bakers on this bright Sunday morning was Prisoner #00416-J, a slender, fair-skinned man in his late thirties whose raven hair was flecked with gray at the sideburns. Beneath a flour-dusted apron, he wore his standard-issue garb--a green cotton shirt and matching pants with a bright identifying stripe down the outseam. Convicted of armed robbery in 1960, 416-J had served seven years inside the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City; before that, he'd put in four grim years in Leavenworth for stealing--and fraudulently cashing--several thousand dollars' worth of postal money orders. He'd spent most of his adult life behind the bars of one jail or another and had become a stir-wise creature, canny to the ways of prison survival.
More than two thousand inmates were crammed inside 'Jeff City,' this vast Gothic bastille, which, upon its founding in 1836, was the first U.S. prison west of the Mississippi. Over the decades, it had developed a reputation as a school for rogues--and as one of America's most violent prisons. In 1954, a team of corrections experts described riot-prone Jeff City this way: 'Square foot for square foot, it is the bloodiest forty-seven acres in America.'1 Yet the prison complex was set in a lazy, almost bucolic part of the Midwest. Beyond the limestone walls, tugboats churned through the Missouri River, and Vs of geese honked in the haze along the flyway toward summer haunts. Freight trains could often be heard singing out their whistle sighs as they clacked and heaved on the old tracks that ran beside the river.
At Jeff City, 416-J had spent a lot of time looking out over that countryside, dreaming of how to get himself there. He'd become an old hand in the bakery; he had done kitchen work for years and never made any trouble--in fact he scarcely drew any attention to himself at all. Most prison officials didn't know his name and could barely recall his face--to them he was just another inmate with a number. One Jeff City warden described him as 'penny ante.' A corrections commissioner put it slightly more bluntly: 'He was just a
A state psychiatrist had examined 416-J the year before and had found that though he wasn't outright crazy, he was 'an interesting and rather complicated individual3--a sociopathic personality who is severely neurotic.' He was intelligent enough, with an IQ of 106, slightly above average. But the psychiatrist noted that the prisoner suffered from 'undue anxiety' and 'obsessive compulsive concerns' about his physical health. He was a thoroughgoing hypochondriac, always complaining of maladies and poring over medical books. He imagined he had heart palpitations and suffered from some strange malformation of his cranium. He often could be seen with a stopwatch in hand, checking his own pulse. His stomach bothered him, necessitating that he eat bland foods. He took Librium for his nerves4 and various painkillers for his nearly incessant headaches, but the doctor thought he should have more attention.
'It is felt that he is in need of psychiatric help,'5 the state shrink observed in closing. 'He is becoming increasingly concerned about himself.' This evaluation could have been used to describe a lot of prisoners in Jeff City--maybe hundreds of them--so the corrections officers paid little attention to the psychiatrist's report.
IF THE GUARDS had been watching him closely during the past few weeks of April 1967, they would have observed that 416-J was behaving strangely. He had been plowing through travel books about Mexico and checked out an English-Spanish dictionary from the prison library. He experimented with making his skin darker by applying a walnut dye.6 He drank considerable quantities of mineral oil7 (one of the many odd health remedies he swore by) and stayed up far into the night, his mind racing with ideas.
Often as not, those ideas were fueled by amphetamines, which by whatever name--speed, bennies, splash, spaniels--were rife inside the walls of Jeff City. He usually took the drug in pill or powder form, but he also shot up with needles, and he was known among the prison population as a 'merchant' in the amphetamine trade. 'When he was using,'8 said one inmate who'd known him for years, 'he would lay down in his cell and he would think. He would say how it made his mind clear up. He would go all the way back until he was six or seven years old. Or, he might go over a job and see the mistakes he had made.'
Lately, 416-J had been practicing yoga in his cell, or at least something that
But there was something else: just the day before, on April 22, 416-J had received a guest down in the visitation room. This was highly unusual--he was a loner who seemed to have no family or friends on the outside. The prison grapevine had it that the visitor was his brother9 from St. Louis, but 416-J would not talk about it to anyone.
At around eight o'clock this morning, he was allowed to leave his cell and head up to the kitchen. He toted a small sack of toiletries, which drew no one's attention, since culinary employees like him were allowed to shower and shave in the kitchen bathroom. He took the elevator up to the bakery, arriving well before the start of his eleven o'clock shift. He proceeded to cook--and devour--a rather astonishing quantity of eggs10: one dozen.
Then 416-J slipped into the break room, ostensibly to wash up. Inside his sack were a small mirror, a comb, a razor with several extra blades, a bar of soap, and twenty candy bars. There was also a Channel Master pocket transistor radio that he'd bought from the prison canteen two days earlier. As required by Jeff City rules, the number 00416, in tiny print, was permanently etched on the side of the radio's housing. In his shoes, pressing uncomfortably into the soles of his feet, were two wads of cash11 totaling nearly three hundred dollars.
Somewhere in the break room, several days earlier, 416-J had hidden a clean white shirt, and a pair of prison pants that he had dyed black with stencil ink, taking special care to cover up the telltale stripe down the side. Quickly, he removed his prison garb, then slipped on the black pants and white shirt. He put his prison uniform
Next, 416-J took the elevator down to the loading dock area, where a hinged metal box had been partially loaded with fresh bread for the honor farm. The box--four feet by three feet by three feet--was easily large enough for a man to climb inside. And that's exactly what the prisoner did. He crushed several layers of the warm soft bread as he eased himself into the box, and then curled into a tight fetal ball.
At this point he must have had an accomplice--or several accomplices--because a false bottom, punctured with tiny holes for ventilation, was placed on top of him. And then, above that, several more layers of bread were loaded into the box until it was filled. The hinged lid was closed tight. Then the box was dollied outside and placed near the lip of the loading dock.
A few minutes later, a freight truck pulled up. Two inmates hoisted the bread crate into the bed of the truck, which was enclosed with a canopy on three sides but open in the rear. When the prisoners waved the truck on, the driver pulled out from the loading area and approached the security tunnel. An officer came out and inspected the vehicle for a stowaway. He checked the undercarriage and the engine. Then he climbed up into the truck bed to examine the cargo.
