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Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
Читать онлайн.Название Fire in the Big House
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780821446829
Автор произведения Mitchel P. Roth
Издательство Ingram
Daugherty interviewed one grandmother who had told her grandchildren that their father was dead rather than admit that he was in the big house. She said, “I’d hate to have anybody see me here. You see I tried to think of him as dead too, for the children’s sake.” But she admitted having saved money for his burial. During their conversation the grandmother “shivered at the sudden scream of another woman.” The reporter described “a tall, lanky figure in a brown coat” reaching toward a casket and taking off the roses that had been placed there. She threw them to the ground and then “ground them into the floor with her heel.” A “Junior League Woman” who had accompanied her tried to offer support, but the “woman turned on her violently, as if to strike.” A man in uniform rushed over to intervene. “It was the end as she fell to the floor in a violent fit of weeping which continued until she was removed in a state of collapse.”46
No matter where one looked, “serenity was rare on any face, whether of the waiting bereaved or of the hundred or more workers from the Red Cross and Salvation Army who went to and fro among the moving ranks, giving comfort and advice.” On the edge of the crowd, correspondent Mary Daugherty espied “two well-dressed gentlewomen” who seemed to be in their late thirties. Daugherty apparently learned their stories from Salvation Army volunteers or “sympathetic bystanders.” It turned out they were sisters who had found their younger brother among the dead “on the rough tables.” The dead boy had made the mistake of joining a friend, the son of a bank cashier, in a bank heist. Their brother had agreed to drive the car and help take care of the stolen bonds. The cashier’s son escaped with the cash, leaving his partner in crime to face the music as a co-conspirator. He was due to be paroled in June, in part because of his extreme youth.47 Little did he expect that he would get out much sooner—but in a coffin.
Almost anywhere the reporter turned there was a human interest story. There was the case of a youthful mother of five. One of her children happened to be in a Cleveland hospital with a serious disorder at the same time she was reclaiming her husband’s body and trying to find out if she had insurance to cover expenses. Daugherty saw her walking around the fairground for almost an hour “in a sort of apathy” before collapsing.
Once the dead had been removed from the prison and the fairgrounds, it was time to take stock of some of the Ohio Penitentiary personalities who had perished. Among them was Robert Stone, serving a life sentence for the murder of a railroad detective, the brother of celebrated magician Howard Thurston.48 One of the more infamous victims was Oren Hill, a former Ohio Penitentiary guard who was imprisoned for helping an inmate escape on March 10, 1929. His fate was set once he harbored the fugitive John Leonard Whitfield. Though the jailbreak was well planned, Whitfield was traced to Hill’s house the very next day. Rather than give himself up, Whitfield took his own life after being cornered by Columbus city detective Norwood E. Folk and Ohio Penitentiary record clerk Dan Bonzo. Both Hill and his wife were indicted for helping the fugitive. Hill was sentenced to one year, which turned into a death sentence on Easter Monday.49
In a great example of “Beware of what you wish for,” John Bowman had been given a 128-month sentence for forging an eight-dollar check. He was originally sentenced to the Mansfield Reformatory, but asked the judge to relocate him to Columbus so he could be closer to his parents. Thirty-two-year-old Albert Holland had only been behind bars for several hours, beginning a six-to-thirty beef for forgery and a robbery in Coshocton, Ohio, when he perished.50 He was known for his connection to Irene Schroeder, Pennsylvania’s “notorious gun woman,”51 who was confined in the Lawrence County Jail in New Castle, awaiting execution for the murder of a Pennsylvania state trooper. Future best-selling popular historian Bruce Catton, who reported on the fire for a Texas newspaper, chronicled the irony of several of the deaths, including Holland’s.52 Ernest Brown and Mack Talley had just become eligible for parole after serving three years but died in the fire as well.
Carl Lyons, twenty-one, came to the fairgrounds to look for the bodies of his brother, Charles, twenty-five, and cousin Everett, twenty-nine, both in their fourth year of a twenty-five-year stretch for highway robbery. Scrupulously searching the Horticulture Building, he found his brother but no sign of his cousin. Garland Runyon from Lawrence County had only been admitted hours earlier to serve a stint for abandoning his children in Ironton. Joining these unlucky victims was Joe Pedro, who had just been admitted on Monday.53 Jack Beers had just recovered from an illness and had been transferred back to his cell from the hospital in time for the fire. Tubercular Leslie Humphrey, a lifer and a patient in the prison hospital, was probably a roommate with Beers. But he left the hospital “and groped through smoke to help other prisoners until he dropped exhausted.”54
John Anderson, a convict from the Columbus area, ran from his cell at the outbreak and raced over to his brother’s cell, but too late. “Big” Ben Henderson, a highway robber out of Cincinnati, also failed to save his brother from a burning cell. He pointed out the cell on the sixth tier to a reporter, telling him, “This is where my brother died.” The reporter described him as half sobbing, with “no rancor visible in his voice. Only Sorrow.” Big Ben continued, making sure everyone would know his story, “Yep, Hank died in there like a rat. He never had a chance…. There is what is left of his radio. And there is the box where he kept his stuff.” Ben turned away, perhaps to compose himself, still speaking. “I did my best to reach him when they released me from the white cell block [White City]…. But we couldn’t get near the place.” Hank had entered the Ohio Penitentiary in 1922 and was serving one to fifteen years for burglary; Ben followed in 1929.55
Even more memorable was the story of the four Anglian brothers, all housed together in the “doomed cell block.” Two of the brothers, William and John, serving life for murder, were held in the lower tiers and were among the first to be released when the fire broke out. Both risked their lives trying to save others in the ruined cellblock as they searched in vain for their brothers Frank, twenty-one, and Theodore, twenty-three, both serving ten to twenty years for robbery with intent to kill.56 Two other brothers, Walter and Harry Smith, died valiantly after carrying out close to ten men each. Both were overcome by fire and fatigue and took their last breaths in the prison hospital.57
All but a few, who were burned beyond recognition, were eventually claimed. A number of victims remained unidentified, leaving it to the state to establish identifications based on fingerprints. Any trouble identifying a corpse was usually remedied by checking fingerprints, as Bertillon officers went through the painstaking process of “pressing lifeless fingers on ink pads and paper.”58 As the week came to an end, most of the bodies had been sent home either by train or hearse, but that still left a number of unclaimed, and unidentified bodies. Plans were to bury the men at the East Lawn Cemetery on Friday afternoon, but last efforts to check fingerprints pushed the “wholesale burial” to 11 a.m. Saturday. Two trenches were dug in the east end of the cemetery, 150 feet long, 7 and a half feet wide, and 5 feet deep.
Just a mile away was Evergreen Cemetery, where African American victims, unclaimed or unidentified, were set to be interred in a separate ceremony.59 A grave 75 feet long and 6 feet wide had been prepared for the fire victims. But according to the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper, only “two bodies were buried in the Jim Crow cemetery” on Sunday: convicts Robert Thompson, twenty-six, from Lucas, Ohio, and Dempsey Brown, twenty-four, from Hamilton, under the direction of cemetery manager J. W. Williams. According to a Defender reporter, “No