There were two different versions of the killing that landed Robert Franklin Stroud in prison in 1909. In one version — the story that Stroud told when he went to the police and told them of the death — Charlie Von Dahmer had raped and beaten Stroud’s girlfriend, Kitty O’Brien. When Stroud found out about it, he went to confront Von Dahmer, and, in the ensuing struggle a gun was fired and Von Dahmer wound up dead. Von Dahmer was a barman, a friend of Stroud’s and an ex-lover of O’Brien’s. Stroud had met Kitty in Cordova, Alaska, and the couple had moved to Juneau shortly thereafter. Stroud was 18 years old; Kitty was 36.
In the other version of the story, Stroud was O’Brien’s pimp, and Von Dahmer was a client who had refused to pay the $10 fee. When Stroud went to Von Dahmer to collect, he first knocked the man unconscious and then shot him in the back of the head, execution style.
In the rough-and-tumble territory of Alaska at the beginning of the 20th century, such a crime might have gone relatively unnoticed. But Stroud was convicted of manslaughter, and the judge assigned to the case had just arrived in Alaska and wanted to make a name for himself as being tough on crime. Stroud was sentenced to 12 years in the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island. It was the maximum allowable sentence.
Stroud was far from being the model prisoner. He was a morphine user. This was not an unusual offense in the prison or one particularly severely punished, but an orderly at the prison hospital reported him for trying to intimidate him into providing the substance. Stroud reacted by assaulting the orderly. He also stabbed a fellow inmate who was involved in the prison narcotic smuggling business. He was sentenced to an additional six months for the assaults, and transferred to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas.
At Leavenworth, Stroud received news that his younger brother, Marcus, would be coming to visit him. Stroud, probably excited about the coming event — he hadn’t seen his brother for eight years — misbehaved again, right before the scheduled visit. The infraction was slight: he was talking to another prisoner in the cafeteria at a time when it was forbidden. Still, it could have resulted in the cancellation of his upcoming visitation privilege. When a guard reprimanded him, Stroud flew into a rage and assaulted him. The guard had a club, but Stroud had a knife. He stabbed the guard — to death.
This time the crime was more serious than the assault that had landed Stroud in prison to begin with. He had committed murder, and he had done it in front of 1100 prisoners and a handful of guards. Not only that, but the victim was a guard at the prison.
On May 27, 1916 Stroud was convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed by hanging on June 21st, with the intervening time to be spent in isolation. His lawyer immediately began to appeal, on the grounds that it was not clear that the jury had intended for Stroud to be executed. Capital punishment had been abolished in Kansas for the past few decades. Stroud’s trial had provided an opportunity to reinstate the abolished law.
In December, 1916, Stroud’s sentence was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Stroud was retried. He was again convicted, but this time the punishment was life imprisonment.
Stroud’s mother, Elizabeth, had hired his lawyer and been the driving force behind his appeals, and she was not satisfied. She wanted an acquittal for her son. The second trial ended up being thrown out on a technicality, and Stroud was tried a third time. This time he was again found guilty, and sentenced to death. There would be no more trials.
Elizabeth was frantic. The execution was sentenced for April 23, 1920. Elizabeth wrote to President Woodrow Wilson, begging for executive intervention. Wilson commuted Stroud’s sentence to life imprisonment. Wilson’s Attorney General, along with Leavenworth’s warden and the rest of the penitentiary administration and guard staff, were outraged. They persuaded Wilson that, since the original sentence had been for Stroud to be kept in isolation until he was executed, he should be kept there for the rest of his life. Wilson agreed.
You mustn’t think that this meant that Stroud was thrown into a dark, windowless cell. He had been sentenced to segregation from the rest of the prison, not solitary confinement. That meant that, although he was kept from mingling with the rest of the prison population, and generally ate and took his exercise alone, he could talk to the prisoners in the neighboring cells, and was allowed into the prison yard for exercise and fresh air.
One day in the prison yard, Stroud found an injured sparrow. Perhaps it was two sparrows, perhaps a nest full — the stories vary. At any rate, Stroud took the injured bird back to his cell, and nursed it back to health. It was nothing unusual; prisoners were allowed to keep birds.
Stroud became fascinated with the creatures, and began to study them. He read whatever he could on the subject. He performed bird autopsies. Soon he began to invent his own cures for their diseases.
Leavenworth was a new penitentiary, and its warden, William Biddle, saw it as a progressive institution. Prisoners were allowed to improve themselves, and Stroud had taken the opportunity to do so. He studied: correspondence courses in art (he manufactured greeting cards for sale at one point), astronomy, physical science, and engineering. He also studied Theosophy, a discipline that combines religion, philosophy, and science. His interest in ornithology, initially, seemed just the latest phase in his program of self-improvement.
Biddle permitted Stroud to pursue his new interest, even providing him with an additional cell to keep the birds in. He soon switched from sparrows to canaries, and began offering them for sale, both to prisoner visitors and via mail order. He began placing ads for his bird medicine — “Stroud’s Specific”, it was called. He wrote articles for journals.
Stroud’s avocation began to get out of hand. He required more and more — more seeds, more cages, more equipment to distill bird medicines. He kept up a copious correspondence — even greater after the publication of his two books, Diseases of Canaries, and Stroud’s Digest of the Diseases of Birds. Of course, every letter, both incoming and outgoing, had to be perused by prison personnel. Soon just keeping up with Stroud’s correspondence required a full-time prison secretary.
More to the point, Stroud’s cells were filthy. He let his birds fly around them freely, and each bird left droppings every 15 minutes or so. Guards had to continually nag him to clean up his cell, and Stroud’s temper was as bad as it had ever been. He was kind to his birds, however, and they loved to perch on him. During the hot Kansas summers, Stroud dealt with the heat by going around au naturel. It was not a pretty picture.
Eventually, Warden Biddle moved on to another assignment, and Stroud lost his best ally. The new administration wasn’t interested in making things easy for Stroud, who by now had quite a following in the press, most of it sympathetic to Stroud.
In 1933, Stroud ran an paid notice in one of the bird journals, stating that he had not received any royalties from his book, Diseases of Canaries. His publisher, of course, was not happy over that type of publicity, and complained to the warden. A decision was made to transfer Stroud to the prison at Alcatraz, where he would not be permitted to keep birds. Stroud, however, discovered a little-known Kansas law that prevented the transfer of prisoners who were married in Kansas. And Stroud had exactly the right woman in mind.
Della Mae Jones, a young woman from Indiana who had read one of his articles and begun a correspondence with Stroud, was a strong advocate. She had personally begun a petition-writing campaign that had resulted in 50,000 signatures being sent to President Truman, asking for Stroud’s release. The petition had been unsuccessful, but now Jones had another way to help Stroud. She would marry him, and keep him in Kansas — with his birds.
Stroud’s mother, however, wasn’t so happy with the solution. She was deeply devoted to — and possessive of — her son. Moreover, she thought that women in general were bad for Robert; after all, look what had happened in Juneau. When she learned that Jones had married her son, she dropped him like a hot potato. The only thing she did after that for Robert was to testify at a parole hearing that her son was as dangerous as he ever was, and shouldn’t be released. After that, she never had anything to do with him again.
A few years later, it was discovered that some of the equipment that Stroud had procured, ostensibly for for his lab, was actually being used to manufacture alcohol. That was it, as far as the prison authorities were concerned. Stroud was going to Alcatraz.
On December 19, 1942, Stroud was transferred to Alacatraz prison. After that, his bird-raising days were over. He did, however, write two books: Bobbie, an autobiography, and Looking Outward: A History of the U.S. Prison System from Colonial Times to the Formation of the Bureau of Prisons. The warden attempted to prevent him from writing or publishing, but a judge ruled that while the prison could prohibit publication, they could not stop him from writing.
Stroud spent six years in segregation at Alcatraz — his sentence to life in isolation still held.
After that, he spent another 11 years in the hospital wing. He studied law, and learned to read French. He played checkers and chess with some of the guards. Occasionally, he took part in parole hearings, but it didn’t seem that he really wanted parole. On one occasion he said that he would accept it if he was allowed to live wherever he wanted, do whatever he wanted, and was not required to report to a parole officer. At another hearing, when asked what he would do if released, he said that he had a list of people he wanted to kill.
A writer named Tom Gaddis learned about Stroud, and wrote a book about him, which subsequently was made into a popular movie starring Burt Lancaster. The movie portrayed Stroud as a gentle, quiet man, and public opinion once again arose in his favor. Over 100,000 people signed a petition asking to have Stroud freed — it didn’t hurt that most of the signatures were obtained in movie lobbies. His fellow inmates had another view. Alvin Karpis, once named “Public Enemy #1″ by the FBI, said that the decision to refuse him parole was correct. Another inmate, speaking of the “Free Robert Stroud” movement, said, “They don’t want to pardon Robert Stroud. They want to pardon Burt Lancaster.”
In 1959, in ill health and nearly 70 years old, Stroud was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield Missouri. He lived out his last years there, dying on November 21, 1963, at the age of 73. He had been incarcerated for 54 years, 42 of them in isolation. His death was scarcely mentioned in the media, being completely overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on the following day.
Sources: “Robert Stroud”, Wikipedia; “Top Ten Alaskans: Robert Stroud”, Time Specials; “Robert Stroud”, Find a Grave; “Robert ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’ Stroud”, Alcatraz History; “Jail Birds: The Story of Robert Stroud”, Tru Crime Library; “Biography of Birdman Robert F. Stroud, Part 1″, Trivia Library; “Biography of Birdman Robert F. Stroud, Part 2″, Trivia Library; “Birdman of Alcatraz: Kindhearted or Psychopath?”, SF Travel; “Robert Stroud: The Birdman (NOT) of Alcatraz”, CooperToons.