Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Notables Inmates at OSP

Any prison that functions for so many years winds up housing some notable inmates. The Ohio Pen had its share--some famous, some notorious, some just weird or interesting. Here's a list of notable Ohio Penitentiary inmates in no particular order.
Guests of the State
John Hunt Morgan
Confederate cavalry general who led a "raid" north of the Ohio River; after his capture in Columbiana County he escaped from the Pen and fled back to the south. 

James Brown
No, not the Godfather of Soul--though I can't help picturing him. This James Brown was a vampire...in a way. Really he was more of an interesting psychotic. In 1866 he was a sailor on an American vessel in the Indian Ocean when he murdered one of his shipmates and drank the guy's blood. Brown was placed under arrest by the captain, brought back to Massachusetts, and convicted of murder. In those enlightened days they didn't think much of insanity as a defense for any crime, even when it was so clearly the major factor involved--but then again, Jeffrey Dahmer couldn't get an insanity verdict in 1992, and he went much further. At any rate, vampire James Brown was a federal prisoner because of the nautical scene of his crime, and he wound up at the Ohio Penitentiary. Not much information is available about him beyond that, though it can probably be assumed that he gave up blood-drinking cold turkey.

O. Henry
The name William Sidney Porter doesn't ring many bells, but that's what famous short story writer O. Henry was known as when he became inmate #30664 in 1898. Porter was a federal prisoner from Texas. He was convicted of embezzlement (a crime he most likely didn't commit at all; an audit years after his time as a teller and bookkeeper at the First National Bank of Austin turned up discrepancies and they gladly laid the blame at his feet). He was already an experienced writer when he turned himself in and was admitted to the big house on March 25, 1898. Inside he worked as the night druggist (he was a licensed pharmacist) and got his own room, never having to live in the common cell block. One of the many stories he wrote at the Pen, "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking," was the first to bear the O. Henry pseudonym. He's best known for "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief." The prison baseball field completed in 1970 was named O. Henry Field.

Chester Himes
Well-known black writer of the civil rights era. His work was infrequently political; mostly he wrote hard-boiled crime fiction and detective stories. Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909, he moved with his family to Pine Bluff, Arkansas--and then finally to Cleveland after a horrifying experience in the unreconstructed, racist South. (Gunpowder exploded in his brother's eyes during a school science experiment, and he was rushed to the nearest hospital, where a doctor refused to treat him--and possibly save his eyesight--because he was a black child at a whites-only emergency room.) After he was kicked out of OSU during his freshman year for playing a prank, things seemed to go downhill; he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery in 1928, and sent to the Ohio Pen to serve his 20-25 year sentence (incarceration and hard labor). Once there he found writing to be his best escape, a way to earn respect from guards and prisoners alike and also avoid violence. He started out with short stories, mainly published in something called The Bronzeman, then in 1934 made his first sale to Esquire. A close friendship with Langston Hughes opened some doors in the literary world, and helped him publish his best-known works: the novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, and the Harlem Detective series of violent, racially charged police mysteries (subsequently made into films such as Cotton Comes to Harlem and A Rage in Harlem). One of his early Esquire stories, "To What Red Hell" (1934), concerned the catastrophic 1930 fire at the Ohio Penitentiary.

Charles Makley and Harry Pierpont
Close friends and associates of John Dillinger. They participated extensively in his crime spree, robbing banks and shooting it out with the police. When Dillinger was arrested in 1933 and held in the county jail in Lima, Ohio, Makley and Pierpont (along with confederate Russell Clark) set out to free him. In the process, Pierpont fatally shot Allen County Sheriff Jesse Sarber. Apprehended in Tucson, Arizona, in January 1934, they were extradited to Indiana and then Ohio, where guilty verdicts were handed down. Both Makley and Pierpont were sentenced to die in the electric chair for their part in Sheriff Sarber's murder. They were transferred to Columbus on March 27, 1934, along with Clark, who had received a life sentence. But death row didn't suit the two partners, and they worked out an audacious escape. Taking a page from John Dillinger's book, Makley and Pierpont carved model guns from bars of soap, blackened them with shoe polish, and made a run for it on September 22. After assaulting a guard and trying to free Russell Clark (he chose to stay in his cell), they were confronted by guards with real, non-soap guns, and were gunned down in the corridor. Makley was killed; Pierpont was badly wounded, but survived to meet his end in Old Sparky at last on October 17.

Sam Sheppard
One of the most famous wrongful convictions in the long and storied history of American injustice is the case of Dr. Sam Sheppard. A respected citizen of Bay Village (a rich suburb just west of Cleveland) and a talented osteopath and neurosurgeon, he seemed about as unlikely a murder suspect as imaginable. But that's exactly what he became overnight in 1954. In the early morning hours of the Fourth of July, an unknown intruder (a "bushy-haired man") beat Dr. Sheppard unconscious (twice!)--and bludgeoned Marilyn Sheppard to death. Prosecutors had no interest in the bushy-haired man, instead deciding to pin the whole thing on Sam, who was thought to have sufficient motive because of an affair he was having with a nurse and Marilyn's recent pregnancy. The judge told columnist Dorothy Kilgallen before the trial that Sheppard was "guilty as hell," so he saw no reason to sequester the jury--this during a time when all the local newspapers were expressing similarly biased opinions on each day's front page. Predictably, on December 21, 1954 the jury returned a guilty verdict: Murder in the Second Degree, Life in Prison. Two and a half weeks after the verdict, Dr. Sheppard's mother shot herself in the head, and eleven days after that, his father died from a bleeding gastric ulcer. Dr. Sam Sheppard's luck only changed when he got a new lawyer, an up-and-comer named F. Lee Bailey who started to file intelligent, effective appeals. The court's bias, the failure to sequester, a near-total absence of blood spatter on Dr. Sheppard, specific injuries sustained by Marilyn and Sam, and an anomalous blood type present at the crime scene--all had been blithely overlooked. Once Bailey succeeded in getting a new trial (thanks in part to Earl Warren's Supreme Court, which upheld the decision to grant one), Sam Sheppard was found not guilty and freed. A corrrupt legal system had cost him ten full years of his life. Afterward he became a kind of celebrity; although the producers always denied it, the TV show The Fugitive (and later, the movie) was clearly based on his story. The major difference, of course, is that Dr. Richard Kimble (a doctor who awakens to an intruder in his home, is knocked out by him, and then finds that the man has killed his wife) escapes from the prison transport in a fluke accident and goes on the run to seek out the real killer. Nothing so cinematic happened to Sheppard. Also, the real killer in his case merely had "bushy hair," which is nowhere near as interesting as The Fugitive's one-armed man. (Incidentally, Mr. Bushy Hair has quite likely been identified. A convicted murderer named Richard Eberling, a handyman and window washer who worked for the doctor on occasion, boasted of the crime to fellow inmates and eventually confessed to Sheppard's son in 1993 when the son set out to clear his father's name for good. F. Lee Bailey, however, still believes a female neighbor responsible.)

James H. Snook
Executed after a very brief stay in 1930, Dr. James H. Snook was convicted of the murder of young Theora Hix. Snook was a professor at OSU and Hix was a student he had an affair with; once things went bad he drove her to the outskirts of the city and beat her to death with a hammer. The torrid details--particularly the sex stuff--made for a sensational trial, the saga of which is still fascinating reading.