Robert Stroud

Robert Franklin Stroud
Stroud's mugshot
Born	Robert Franklin Stroud
Other names	The Birdman of Alcatraz

"Birdman of Alcatraz" redirects here. For the 1962 film, see Birdman of Alcatraz (film).

Robert Franklin Stroud (January 28, 1890 – November 21, 1963), known as the Birdman of Alcatraz, was a prisoner in Alcatraz who raised and sold birds. Despite his nickname, he actually kept birds only at Leavenworth, prior to being transferred to Alcatraz.

Early life

Robert Stroud was born in Seattle, Washington, to Elizabeth and Ben Stroud who were of German or Hungarian descent. He was the couple's first child, although Elizabeth had two daughters from a previous marriage. In 1903, Robert ran away from home at age 13. By 1908, he was in the frontier town of Cordova, Alaska. There, he met and began a relationship with 36-year old Kitty O'Brien, a dance hall entertainer and prostitute. In November, they moved to Juneau.

Arrest, trial and imprisonment

According to Stroud, on January 18, 1909, while he was away at work, an acquaintance of theirs, F. K. "Charlie" Von Dahmer, viciously beat Kitty. That night, Stroud confronted Von Dahmer and a struggle ensued, resulting in the latter's death from a gunshot wound. However, according to police reports, Stroud had knocked Von Dahmer unconscious and then shot him at point blank range.

Stroud was later arrested with Von Dahmer's wallet in his possession. Although Stroud's mother Elizabeth retained a lawyer for her son, on August 23, 1909, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years in the federal penitentiary on Puget Sound's McNeil Island. (Stroud's crime was handled in the federal system, as Alaska was not yet a state with its own judiciary.)

Robert Stroud is also a fifteen year old student at Hardenhuish School in Wiltshire. He is not in jail and loves milkshakes (only strawberry!). Everyone loves him at Hardenhuish and he has never killed anyone yet...

Prison life

While at McNeil Island, Stroud assaulted a hospital orderly who had reported him to the administration for attempting to obtain morphine through threats and intimidation and also reportedly stabbed a fellow inmate who was involved in the attempt to smuggle the narcotics.

On September 5, 1912, Stroud was sentenced to an additional six months for the attacks and transferred from McNeil Island to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. While there, Stroud was reprimanded by a guard in the cafeteria for a minor rule violation. Although the infraction was not a serious one, it could have annulled Stroud's visitation privilege to meet his younger brother, whom he had not seen in eight years. Stroud stabbed and killed a guard, Andrew Turner, on March 26, 1916. He was sentenced to execution by hanging on May 27 and was ordered to await his death sentence in solitary confinement. The trial was later invalidated. In a later trial he was given a life sentence. That trial was also invalidated, after reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered a new trial, set for May 1918. On June 28, he was again sentenced to death by hanging. The Supreme Court intervened, but only to uphold the death sentence, which was scheduled to be carried out on April 23, 1920.

At this point, Stroud's mother appealed to President Woodrow Wilson and his wife, Edith Bolling Wilson, who halted the execution. Stroud's sentence was again commuted to life imprisonment. Leavenworth’s warden, T. W. Morgan, did not approve of the decision, and ordered that Stroud was to be held in segregation for the complete duration of his imprisonment.

In 1963 a young lawyer who had campaigned for John F. Kennedy in California took to the cause of securing Stroud's release. This lawyer was Richard M. English of California. He met with former President Truman to enlist support, but President Truman declined. He also met with senior Kennedy administration officials who were studying the subject.

English also took the last photo of Stroud in which he is shown with a green visor. The warden of the prison attempted to have English prosecuted for bringing something into the prison he did not take out, namely unexposed film. The authorities declined to take any action.

Upon Stroud's death the personal property of Stroud, including original manuscripts, was delivered to English, as his last attorney representative. English later turned over some of the possessions to the Audubon Society.

Birdman

While at Leavenworth, Stroud found three injured sparrows in the prison yard and kept them. He started to occupy his time raising and caring for his birds, soon switching from sparrows to canaries, which he could sell for supplies and to help support his mother. Soon thereafter, Leavenworth’s administration changed and the prison was now directed by a new warden. Impressed with the possibility of presenting Leavenworth as a progressive rehabilitation penitentiary, the new warden furnished Stroud with cages, chemicals, and stationery to conduct his ornithological activities. Visitors were shown Stroud's aviary and many purchased his canaries. Over the years, he raised nearly 300 canaries in his cells and wrote two books, Diseases of Canaries and Stroud's Digest on the Diseases of Birds. He made several important contributions to avian pathology, most notably a cure for the hemorrhagic septicemia family of diseases. He gained respect and also some level of sympathy in the bird-loving field.

Soon, Stroud’s activities created problems for the prison management. According to regulations, each letter sent or received at the prison had to be read, copied and approved. Stroud was so involved in his business that this alone required a full-time prison secretary. Also, most of the time, his birds were let free to fly in his cells. With the very high number of birds he kept, his cell was dirty and Stroud’s personal hygiene was reported to be gruesome. In 1931, an attempt to force Stroud to discontinue his business and get rid of his birds failed after Stroud and his future wife, Della Mae Jones, made his story known to newspapers and magazines and undertook a massive letter- and petition-writing campaign that climaxed in a 50,000-signature petition being mailed to the president. The resultant public outcry allowed Stroud to keep his birds and he was even given a second cell to house them, but his letter-writing privileges were greatly curtailed.

Stroud's cell at Alcatraz

In 1933, however, Stroud took out an advertisement to publicize the fact that he had not received any royalties from the sales of Diseases of Canaries. In retaliation, the publisher complained to the warden and, as a result, proceedings were initiated to transfer Stroud to Alcatraz, where he would not be permitted to keep his birds. Stroud, however, discovered a legal loophole, according to which, he would be allowed to remain in Kansas if he were married there. He therefore married Della Jones in 1933, though he infuriated not only prison officials, who would not allow him to correspond with his wife, but also his mother, who refused any further contact with him and died four years later, in 1937. However, Stroud was able to keep his birds and his canary-selling business until it was discovered, several years later, that some of the equipment Stroud had requested for his lab was in fact being used to distill alcohol with a home-made still.

Alcatraz

Stroud was transferred to Alcatraz on December 19, 1942. While there, he wrote two manuscripts: 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 judge ruled that Stroud had the right to write and keep such manuscripts but upheld the warden’s decision of banning publication.

Stroud spent six years in segregation and another eleven years confined to the hospital wing. He was allowed access to the prison library and began studying law. With his newfound knowledge, Stroud began petitioning the government that his long prison term amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. In 1959, with his health failing, Stroud was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners Springfield, Missouri. However, his attempts to be released on the grounds that his extremely long sentence was cruel and unusual punishment were unsuccessful. On November 21, 1963, Robert Franklin Stroud died at the Springfield Center at the age of 73, after 54 years of incarceration, of which 42 were in segregation. He had been studying French near the end of his life.

Robert Stroud is buried in Metropolis, Illinois (Massac County).

Personal relationships

Initially, Stroud had a close relationship with his mother. She helped him with legal proceedings on many occasions, even managing to elicit sympathy from the president over her son's death sentence. Stroud kept busy with his bird enterprise and had numerous bird-loving pen-pals. He started a regular correspondence with a woman named Della Mae Jones, a bird researcher, resulting in her move to Kansas in 1931 and starting a business with Stroud, selling his medicines. Stroud's mother strongly disapproved of the relationship and moved away from the Leavenworth area. She also argued against her son's application for parole, which became a major obstacle in his attempts to be released from the prison system.

The book and film

Stroud became the subject of a 1955 book by Thomas E. Gaddis, Birdman of Alcatraz , which was adapted in 1962 into a film by Guy Trosper. It was directed by John Frankenheimer and starred Burt Lancaster as Stroud, Karl Malden as a fictionalized and renamed warden, and Thelma Ritter as Stroud's mother. Stroud was never allowed to see the film. Petitions calling for his release or parole were circulated in theater lobbies.

Truth versus fiction

According to those who knew Stroud while he was in prison, the mild-mannered characterization of him, as presented in Gaddis's book and the subsequent film was largely fiction. In Full Circle with Michael Palin, one of his fellow prisoners said, "He was a jerk. He was a guy that thrived on chaos, turmoil, upheaval. He liked other people to be involved in these kind of things, but he was never a participant." When asked by Palin what he thought of the movie, he replied, "Fantasy." Some have challenged the claim that Stroud's transfer to Alcatraz was due to some of the equipment he requested being used to make alcoholic beverages (which was depicted in the film though not shown as the reason for his transfer). There were also allegations of sadism and pedophilia which were raised by short stories allegedly written by Stroud and submitted to magazines for possible publication, including those made by Jim Fisher of the The Kansas City Star, having met and interviewed Stroud early in his career and read his confiscated stories.

External links

• Alcatraz History
• Crime Library