HOT OFF THE PRESS
A new nonfiction book details the Montana prison riot of 1959 and investigates Jerry Myles, the psychopath who caused it
In Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance, author Kevin S. Giles captures the conflict that ensued between career convict Jerry Myles, who had done time at Alcatraz Island and other federal and state prisons, and Warden Floyd Powell. Both men were new to Deer Lodge. Myles wanted to run the prison. Powell wanted to reform it.
That conflict came to a violent climax on April 16 when Myles and accomplices Lee Smart and George Alton seized rifles from the guard catwalks in both cellhouses.
“The cause of the riot is often wrongly portrayed as an escape attempt,” Giles said. “That wasn’t the motive behind it. Jerry Myles didn’t want out of prison. He wanted glory. In his mind Powell and Deputy Warden Ted Rothe shamed him, and he was going to show them who was boss.”
The riot made news from coast to coast. Floyd Powell’s cousin read about it on the front page of the Globe in downtown Boston. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a front-page photograph. National magazines like Life and Saturday Evening Post sent correspondents to Deer Lodge. Inquiries even came from London.
“This is a story of men in crisis,” Giles said of his 440-page book, which he spent 10 years researching and writing. “Despite all the news coverage of the riot over those three days in 1959, little was said or understood about the reasons for it. The riot tore apart many of the men involved and brought anguish to their families.”
Jerry’s Riot recounts Myles’ childhood and his long prison history. It also examines the circumstances leading to the 1959 riot, including the 1957 “pea riot” disturbance. Giles writes about the riot, including the taking of 26 hostages, in painstaking detail. Among the surviving hostages he interviewed to get their first-hand accounts was Victor Baldwin of Deer Lodge, who died recently. He also interviewed the one surviving ringleader, George Alton.
Giles is a native of Deer Lodge. His father, Murry, was a guard who was working inside the prison the afternoon the riot began. “My interest in the riot began with my early recollections of Dad going to work at the old prison, and how an entire shift of guards huddled and smoked outside Tower 7 on Main Street before going inside,” Giles said. “They stood there in blue uniforms, all ready to go, and then the guard on the tower dropped the key to them. Even to a young boy, it was quite a sight.”
Soon after Giles started investigating the riot in 1995, it became clear to him that Jerry Myles was the central figure of the story. “I didn’t have a title for the book for a few years until Jerry Myles emerged in the dominant way he did in my research,” Giles said. “Here was a psychopath who had led a mutiny at the federal prison in Atlanta, and then had watched a fatal escape attempt at Alcatraz. He was a riot leader in training. What he did to gain control of Montana State Prison was hauntingly similar to what he’d seen happen at Alcatraz.”
Giles said evidence shows that Myles deliberately committed a burglary to get inside Montana State Prison. Myles had heard about the “con boss” system at the prison, where inmates were given jobs supervising other inmates in the industries. “He had spent all of his adult life in one prison or another, felt alone and scared on the outside, and thought because of his long history in prisons that he deserved to run one,” Giles said. “This is the mind of a psychopath. He came to Deer Lodge after hearing that convicts ran the industries and he saw a place to take control. Evaluations from other prisons showed that if he wasn’t held in close custody, trouble would happen.”
Myles was in charge of the garment shop inside the walls when Powell came to Deer Lodge in the summer of 1958 from Wisconsin State Prison. Powell was the first Montana State Prison warden who was not a political appointee. A few months later, he hired Ted Rothe, an industries supervisor from the same prison in Wisconsin, to be his deputy warden. Powell and Rothe decided to end the con boss system that Myles dearly loved. When they did, they upset the balance of power in the prison.
“Riots broke out in prisons all over the country in the 1950s for much the same reason,” Giles said. “As wardens wanted to make prisons more progressive, they shifted the balance of power more toward the custodial staff. In prisons, any shift from routines causes trouble. Powell and Rothe were willing to take that risk, but they didn’t know enough about Jerry Myles and his inclinations.”
When Powell arrived in Deer Lodge, the prison had no means of classifying and segregating inmates by crime, and had little on record about the most dangerous men. “There’s no evidence that anyone knew why Myles did time in Alcatraz, considered the last stop among federal prisons, or why he should be segregated from other prisoners in Deer Lodge,” Giles said. Walter Jones Jr., a Butte native and the prison’s new sociologist, tried unsuccessfully to convince Rothe to segregate Myles, Giles said.
“And so Montana had a riot that resulted in loss of life,” he said.
Despite Powell’s determination to make the prison more secure, it fell like a house of cards on April 16, Giles said. “The riot succeeded because Myles and Smart seized rifles that guards carried on the catwalks in both cell houses. Unfortunately, one of the rifles had ammunition. Those rifles gave Jerry Myles great leverage to start his riot.”
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PROFILE: ED "BUS" ELLSWORTH
How the title of this new Montana book, 'Jerry's Riot,' came to be
By Kevin S. Giles
Author of Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance
In the 30 years since his last days as warden, Ed “Bus” Ellsworth had never gone inside the old prison in Deer Lodge. I coaxed him back on a raw March afternoon, anxious to hear what he could remember about the 1959 riot and its aftermath.
I was researching a book that I planned to write someday. I didn’t have a title for it because, like writers do, I was trying to find the central story. Newspaper reports of the day described the riot as “a failed escape attempt by a desperate madman.” That seemed much too predictable an explanation, and I thought Ellsworth could give me some perspective.
I knew he played a prominent role in ending the riot. I wanted him to trace the steps he took that cold starlit night on April 18, 1959, when National Guard troops stormed the cell houses to rescue 23 hostages the ringleaders had vowed to shoot, hang or burn.
Old Montana State Prison’s brick and stone facade loomed just blocks from Ellsworth’s living room window, yet in the sunset of his life, he thought of it as a distant place. At first he told me he didn’t want to go. He said he couldn’t remember much that would help me.
When I was a boy I knew him as Warden Ellsworth, an iron-disciplined man with a military buzz-cut. Being my dad’s boss, he seemed all the more unapproachable. One summer he caught me sneaking into the drive-in theater south of town. All the kids did it, once or twice anyway. My friend and I, creeping through the river willows near the drive-in, attracted attention from passing motorists who had heard news reports of two inmates escaping from a prison ranch. I don’t know if I was more scared of the warden and the tall prison guard who stood beside him with a rifle, or of my dad if he found out. Ellsworth drove us home in the back of a prison cage car, gold with a green stripe across the hood. If he ever told my dad, I didn’t hear about it, but I regretted right away that I hadn’t paid the dollar or so to see the movie.
On the day that I drove Ellsworth to the prison in my blue pickup, he didn’t mention that incident. Maybe he forgot it, but at my age I didn’t feel inclined to remind him.
He forgot his earlier hesitation when we started talking about the riot. An opportunity to set the facts straight can be powerful persuasion to an old man. I told him how I had collected hundreds of pages of documents that detailed the long federal prison career of Jerry Myles, the riot’s chief antagonist. Anyone familiar with the riot knew his name but not much else.
Until I read those records, I didn’t realize that Myles was much more than an ordinary convict. His riot wasn’t an escape attempt, as Ellsworth’s predecessor, Floyd Powell, tried to convince everyone. Myles was a psychopath, trained in America’s worst prisons. The riot in Deer Lodge mimicked a bloody outbreak he had watched at Alcatraz Island during his incarceration there, and even earlier, a mutiny he led at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Myles was a student of prison riots. He didn’t want to escape from Montana State Prison. He wanted attention, even if that meant dying.
When Ellsworth and I arrived at Old Montana Prison, now a museum, we met retired guard Bob McNally. He brought the key to the outside door of the northwest cell house tower, where Ellsworth led three men up the stairs to flush out Myles and Lee Smart, his teenage boyfriend. Smart, convicted of murdering a traveling salesman in northern Montana, shot and killed Deputy Warden Ted Rothe when the riot began. More than 30 hours later, as the riot crumbled, Myles and Smart retreated to the tower of Cell House 1 with two rifles they seized from catwalk guards.
McNally pried open the rusty lock. He waved his flashlight beam around the dark cavern. Plywood covered windows from the inside. Bars remained intact. Pigeon droppings matted the stairs and floors.
We climbed the narrow concrete stairs to rooms that were dark and cold and felt, in the context of our visit, like death. We crossed the landing where Myles shot and wounded Capt. Francis “Russ” Pulliam, a National Guardsman from Missoula. On the fourth floor, sunlight peeped through the broken brickwork along tall windows where two bazooka rounds hit before rifle teams charged into the prison yard. Then Ellsworth took us to the tomblike room at the top of the tower.
In a measured voice he described the murder-suicide that took place there. Before the National Guard could take them captive, Myles killed Smart and then himself. Ellsworth found the bodies. Like many other people I had interviewed, he described Myles as having no other apparent motive but to make a name for himself.
“It was his riot,” Ellsworth told me.
Suddenly the meaning of that riot jumped out at me from documents, interviews and photographs. Yes, the story was about guards and prisoners caught in violence. Yes, it was about the failed attempts of Powell, the new warden, to reform a terrible prison. And yes, the story was about a small town in western Montana that sent generations of men to work inside the walls.
Without the tragic self-indulging Jerry Myles, however, the story didn’t exist at all.
That’s why I chose “Jerry’s Riot” as the name of my book.
As Ellsworth wandered around the old prison that day, encountering memories wherever he turned, he told me that the prison was a terrible place to work. Many guards never wanted to come back inside.
Ellsworth, a World War II veteran, former Powell County sheriff and a longtime National Guard colonel, died in 2001. Many others I interviewed are gone too: Everett Felix, the guard captain taken hostage; Victor Baldwin, another guard hostage who died recently in Deer Lodge; Elmer Erickson, the prison’s business manager at the time of the riot, and Carl Parish, a prison employee nearly captured during the takeover.
To them and many others I interviewed for Jerry’s Riot, what happened over three days in 1959 stuck to their minds like glue, but they didn’t care much for reliving their prison days.
Only Jerry Myles, it seems, wanted to stay.
(Kevin Giles is author of Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance. Further details about the book are available at www.skybluewaterspress.com.)
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PROFILE: A MAN IN BLUE
Victor Baldwin, a guard hostage in the 1959 Montana prison riot, never forgot
By Kevin S. Giles
A gray drizzle fell as Victor Baldwin stood on the exact spot where rioting inmates took him hostage in 1959. It was 40 years later, yet he remembered everything: what they said, how they threatened him, how scared he felt.
Baldwin was one of 26 hostages held at Montana State Prison during a violent takeover led by inmate Jerry Myles, who had served a long stretch at Alcatraz Island before he came to Deer Lodge.
On the day that I went into Old Montana Prison with Baldwin, fog shrouded the guard towers. The exercise yard, once the hub of prison life, was silent. Our footsteps echoed in the one remaining cell house, cold as a deep freezer.
I was researching a book I had wanted to write since I was a boy. Baldwin was a key source for Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance, as were several other guards and inmates who had first-hand knowledge of the riot. Baldwin recalled how Myles walked around the prison like he owned the place. Guards called him “Little Hitler” among other names.
The worst fear among guards, Baldwin told me, was that they would lose control in a riot. Guards in 1959 had little training. They had no special armor to protect themselves. Cell houses had no telephones, and guards had no means of communicating with one another except in face-to-face conversations. It was especially dangerous, too, because until late 1958 the prison had no classification system. Rapists mingled with the fish. Murderers walked with check forgers. Violent men controlled the meek. The “con boss” system, a state-sanctioned arrangement that permitted convict leaders to run the inside industries, gave some inmates more power than the guards.
When new Warden Floyd Powell fired the con bosses, replacing them in some cases with civilian supervisors, he upset the balance of power in the prison. Jerry Myles was one of those con bosses, and he vowed revenge.
On the day the riot began, April 16, 1959, Baldwin was a second-shift floor officer in Cell House 2, also known as “the old cell house” or the 1896 cell house, when Myles and his accomplices took him. He had just returned from eating dinner in the guards’ dining room outside the walls when he felt a knife poking his ribs.
Decades later, as we walked in the old prison, I asked Victor to show me where it happened. The older cell house no longer stands; the state tore it down four months after the riot because of structural damage after an earthquake. We stood on an open concrete pad where his desk sat, close to the wall in the northeast corner. He showed me how Myles and the others came from behind, cornering him with weapons.
It’s haunting to hear a guard take you back in time. Baldwin, like many other guards and inmates I interviewed, remembered everything that happened to him that day. He thought he was going to die, and dying makes a man pay attention.
For me, Jerry’s Riot was a personal adventure. My dad, Murry, worked with Baldwin inside the prison the day the riot began but wasn’t taken hostage. Dad later became a lieutenant of custody, and until I left home and went to college, the prison was part of my life. I had heard Dad’s stories about the riot for many years, and at dinner (when he wasn’t at work) he often told us stories of various incidents inside the walls.
When I decided to write Jerry’s Riot, I had two main objectives in mind: to compile a clear and accurate account of the riot, and to tell an interesting story about prison life in the 1950s. I used language commonly spoken then (which is why I say “guards” instead of “correctional officers,” for example) and tried to portray the risk that guards and other employees took each time they entered those gray walls.
It’s a shame that Victor Baldwin, and my dad, and other old guards died before they could read Jerry’s Riot. In many ways the book is all about them. Some people say the dynamics inside prisons never change. If that’s the case, my book is all about guards of today and tomorrow too.
(Kevin S. Giles is a native of Deer Lodge. More details about Jerry’s Riot are available at www.skybluewaterspress.com)
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ESSAY
Technology by itself doesn't make prisons secure; still needed are corrections officers who know how to talk to prisoners
By Kevin S. Giles
On April 16, 1959, three angry inmates seized Montana State Prison. They took 26 hostages, including Warden Floyd Powell, and made half-hearted demands for better conditions.
Jerry Myles, the psychopath who led the riot, wanted recognition, not a better place to live. Prison to him was home. He enjoyed more freedom at MSP than at other state and federal prisons where he had served time. At Alcatraz Island, for example, his keepers kept him in close custody for more than a dozen years.
Myles read Montana State Prison’s security like a book. He and co-conspirators Lee Smart and George Alton gained total control in the time it takes to eat dinner. They held the prison for 36 hours before the National Guard charged inside in the wee hours of April 18.
The takeover looked so easy. Why couldn’t the prison guards prevent it?
The answer is simpler than people might think. Guards (as they were known then) had no knowledge to prevent a riot. One guard, for example, said all he was told was to throw his keys over the prison wall. Guards were no match for Myles, an accomplished career criminal who led a mutiny at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. That misbehavior sent him to Alcatraz until shortly before he arrived at MSP on a burglary conviction.
Three men died in the Deer Lodge riot, but what’s often overlooked is that most inmates refused to get involved because they got fair treatment from the guards. Several inmates risked their lives by feeding and protecting hostages.
Even today, corrections officers don’t get their due. Prison movies like The Shawshenk Redemption and The Longest Mile drew critical praise, but like many others of the genre, they portrayed guards and wardens as sadistic thugs. The public has a limited and somewhat skewed perception of the work that goes on behind fences and bars. Nobody denies a history of corruption in prisons. What needs to be understood, though, is that prisons would fail without officers who have the courage to temper the will of dangerous inmates.
We might be lulled into thinking that prisons today, loaded with cameras, electronic doors and other sophisticated technologies, can’t possibly fall to a man like Jerry Myles who wants his name in the headlines. After all, progress in the corrections industry nationwide has been substantial since that riot in Deer Lodge 47 years ago. Yet the murderous rampage at MSP in 1991 showed how quickly serious trouble can arise, even in controlled, segregated units.
In 1959, guards didn’t have body armor, two-way radios, protective rubber gloves, metal detectors, pepper spray or quick response teams. Training was poor, often nonexistent. Some guards reported that their orientation before the riot consisted of being sent into the exercise yard among hundreds of inmates.
Before Powell came to MSP, prisoners weren’t classified by crime or age. Killers mingled with bad check writers, hardened men with scared boys. As the new warden made changes, he upset the balance of power inside the prison and consequently, Deer Lodge became the latest in a chain of violent prison riots across the country. Myles attacked Deputy Warden Ted Rothe with a knife. As they fought, Smart shot and killed Rothe with a rifle taken from a prison guard.
Today, Montana State Prison bears little resemblance to its fortress-like ancester, now a museum. In contrast to the imposing stone walls downtown, familiar to picture-snapping tourists for decades, a silver stream of razor barb surrounds the newer prison west of town. The prison looks different but the role of a corrections officer remains much the same as in 1959. Officers can’t be friends. They can’t be enemies, either. They’re like parents but even with the bells and whistles of security they’re in constant danger. Their best defense is a mutual respect with inmates that allows them to resolve problems before molehills become mountains.
Despite all the upgrades in corrections, officers today earn barely more than workers in fast food restaurants. In Montana, the going wage is $12. That’s an improvement over the pittance that guards made in 1959, but hardly reflective of the skill and courage needed to work among felons.
It’s no wonder that the prison can’t find enough guards, or keep them for an extended time. Most people might not care much about the wages of corrections officers. The 1959 riot reminds us of the costly alternative.
(Kevin S. Giles is the son of a former MSP prison lieutenant and author of the book, Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance.)
