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 ceremonies and blowing of trumpets were accorded them. These demonstrations were held in lily-white cemeteries where ministers of many faiths and various organizations took part in burial services.”60
Lloyd Vest, a Columbus police officer, was asked several days after having visited the fairgrounds whether he had seen anything unusual. He reported that his attention was called to “a knife, [a] dagger about two and a half inches long, that was cut to a knife edge and come to a point, very sharp, and had a wooden handle on it wrapped.” He said it had been taken off one of the victims. He was alerted by workers to other items of interest, with one telling him, “We have a lot of other stuff over here we have taken.” Vest was then shown a box, two feet long and eighteen inches wide, a .32 automatic Colt inside of it. He was informed that “it come off of the prisoners…. We taken that off of a man that we taken [sic] $140 in money off of.” Other items that could have been put to deadly use included files and saws. One of the fire investigation inquisitors, Director of Public Welfare Hal H. Griswold, shrewdly observed, “They all have knives in there now, don’t they?” Vest said, “I don’t know anything about it,” which was probably true since he worked outside the prison as a police officer. Griswold flippantly responded, “If they don’t have them it is probably the only institution in Ohio where those things are not manufactured.”61
On April 22, as the bodies were being prepared at the fairgrounds for burial, Governor Myles Cooper, who had arrived early the morning after the fire, was convening a Board of Inquiry (BOI) to look into the causes of the fire. The outset of the investigation was marked by conflict between the county and state authorities over whether to suspend Warden Thomas. The issue was settled quickly when Governor Cooper took the case out of the hands of the local prosecutor and assigned the attorney general to take over the official inquiry. The hearings began in the prison records office, which had been converted into a temporary courtroom.
3
COLUMBUS, OHIO
Here were all ranks and ages, from the man of high life to the meanest pickpocket, from the gray-haired man of 80 down to the boy of 14.
—James Finley, 1850
The Ohio Penitentiary was “most unsuitably situated in the midst of the city of Columbus, a few blocks from the main street.”
—Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories (1933)
Anyone approaching the Ohio Penitentiary (also known as the Ohio State Penitentiary) in Columbus from “a distance” and a “southern standpoint”
