Joliet Prisons

Home

Gallows waiting for him

The man who tried to break into the old prison as well as out of it

The drama of tough guys who dreamed of gaining freedom from behind the walls of the two prisons at Joliet has been played out on the front pages of the Herald-News for decades. These desperate men dug tunnels, built crude ladders, braided ropes, poisoned guards' coffee, smuggled in guns and took hostages in attempts to regain their lost freedom. But only a few of them ever succeeded in actually getting away. Instead, their foiled plans became front page fodder for this newspaper, which has preserved that news on microfilm.

They were men like William Evans. He holds the distinction of being the man who tried to break into the old prison as well as out of it. Evans was a true desperado. And he rode into Joliet one spring afternoon in 1927 driving a stolen car. Evans, who was then an escaped convict from Missouri and a wanted bank robber in Illinois, had a rough idea about busting his buddy out of the old prison on Collins street. He and Harry Funk had been cellmates at the state prison in Jefferson City, Mo. Funk was suspected of helping Evans escape in 1923. In the summer of 1925, the two bandits walked into the Farmer's State Bank at Chenoa, Ill. posing as bank examiners. Once they were behind the teller cages, they pulled guns and escaped with $184,000 in cash and bonds.

Funk was captured and sentenced to prison a few months later. He arrived at the old prison in December, 1925, and started working in the fiber shop. One of his daily work assignments was to help load furniture on to cars each afternoon near the prison's east gate. And that's where Evans showed up on May 11, 1927 dressed as a priest. But the desperado didn't know that plans of the escape had been leaked to the warden. Funk had been moved to Stateville the previous day and guards were waiting for the bad guy wearing a clergy collar. Evans put up a struggle. But he wasn't able to get back to a pint bottle full of nitroglycerin in his stolen car. He had planned to blast open a hole in the wall if Funk wasn't on the furniture work detail. ""I wanted to get a pal out,'' the bandit told reporters the next day. ""I put up a battle and would have battled all the way to take my pal away.'' ""You were certainly a chump to try what you did,'' a deputy warden said. ""A fellow can't go back on a pal, can he?'' Evans asked.

Evans was convicted of the Chenoa bank robbery and sent back to the same prison he had tried to break into, only this time he was welcomed inside it. But he wanted back out. In 1930, Evans was considered the ringleader of a gang of convicts caught digging an underground tunnel. They had been working on the tunnel for several months when it was found. Evans finally was released from the old prison in 1936. But he didn't see one minute of freedom from the parole. Missouri prison officials were waiting for him at the front door. They took Evans back to Jefferson City to complete a life term there for killing a Kansas City cop in 1919. Henry ""Midget'' Ferneckes, a bank robber and killer, pulled off one of the most clever escapes used at the old prison on Collins Street. Midget, who earned his nickname because of his 5-foot-4-inch height, had 10 years of time behind the walls when he escaped one Saturday afternoon in 1935. The little convict, who was described as brilliant, had a plan that took pure guts to pull off. But he had been planning the escape for months. Midget, who worked in the prison fiber shop, had closelyobserved the visiting procedure used in the prison.

He bleached a prison uniform white, grew an unauthorized mustache under a bandage on his upper lip and somehow obtained a pair of contraband sunglasses. On the afternoon of Aug. 3, he pulled off the bandage and put on the sunglasses and his white clothing. He then walked through two barred gates as a civilian and entered the front gatehouse. He handed a note carrying the name of a convict who was housed in Stateville to the guard. The guard gave Midget directions on how to get to Stateville from the old prison. Midget walked out of the old prison as a free man without saying one word. Prison officials originally thought the little convict was hiding somewhere inside the prison after he was discovered missing. But four guards eventually lost their jobs because of the escape. A few days after the escape, the warden received a letter. ""You were all good to me,'' it said. ""Too many men was my reason for escaping. However, I like Joliet and am hereabouts. Why does the governor offer a $1,000 reward for me and only $50 for anyone else who escapes?'' The letter was signed Midget. But the warden wasn't sure if Midget wrote the letter or not. The little convict was known for writing letters to officials.

He had written his condolences to the state's attorney's office following the death of the prosecutor who had convicted him. He had also sent Christmas greetings to the judge who sentenced him to prison. Midget had been sent to prison in 1925 after holding up a bank and killing a loan officer. He had been sentenced to hang, but the death sentence had been reversed by the state supreme court.

He was suspected of several other bank robberies, which had been pulled off by a short, lone bandit armed with a gun in each hand. Midget was carrying two loaded .45 pistols in his pockets when he was captured in the Chicago library in 1924. The escaped convict was captured by Chicago detectives a few months after the prison escape. But he told them he would never go back to prison when they locked him in a jail holding cell. The detectives found his body in that cell a few hours later. He had taken poison from a small vial hidden in the cuff of his pants. In 1939, four convicts thought they had formed the perfect plan to go over the walls at Stateville. They were all killers serving life sentences and felt they had nothing to lose. For months, Patrick Joyce, Joseph Jazorak and Peter Balcurilis had collected pills from the prison hospital. The medicine contained hyoscine, a drug used to produce twilight sleep. On the morning of Sept. 14, 1939, they ground the pills into a powder and passed it to Moy King Hong, the fourth convict in the escape plan. Hong worked in the prison kitchen and was responsible for preparing the meals sent to guards in towers on the prison walls. The 35-year-old Chinese killer simply dropped the powder into the pot of coffee that was destined for the guard towers on the west end of the north wall. The food and coffee was passed up by ropes to the hungry guards during the noon hour. But one guard spoiled the plan. Albert Lenzen, the guard in tower two, took one sip of his coffee and didn't like the way it tasted.

He lowered the coffee back down to a trustee, who drank it and passed out. Meanwhile, the other guards in four towers fell unconscious from the drugged coffee. Lenzen, who was suffering from just his one sip of the drugged coffee, saw three convicts approaching the wall carrying a roughly constructed ladder. The guard sounded an alarm and Joyce, Jazorak amd Balcurilis were captured. The ladder they had built was 11 feet too short to reach the top of the wall. And Hong, who the other three hadn't waited for, spilled the beans about the escape plan because they had double-crossed him. All of the guards who had drank the coffee were admitted to the hospital. The escape became known as the ""poison coffee'' attempt. Old newspaper clippings show that Joyce was finally set free in 1952, after a judge ruled his rights had been violated in 1929. He was not re-tried for the murder of a Chicago cop because all the witnesses were dead by then.

Other clippings show that Jazorak was paroled in 1953, after serving 22 years for the murder of a deputy sheriff during a bank robbery in Buckley, Ill. Jazorak was immediately seized by federal agents to start serving a prison sentence for robbing three Illinois post offices. But there are no newspaper stories to show the fate of Balcurilis and Hong. The most famous escape at Stateville happened in the fall of '42 when Roger ""The Terrible'' Touhy and Basil ""The Owl'' Banghart and five others stole a garbage truck and rushed the west wall with a ladder. Their escape was successful because a tower guard failed to fire his weapon. The guard feared that he would hit one of the hostages the gang was holding. But guards didn't fail to shoot two years later when 10 tough guys tried a repeat performance of the Touhy escape. This desperate bunch included Major Price, a killer who was a veteran of several escape attempts and had been once termed the most rebellious man inside Stateville; Herman Coppes, a killer who had escaped in 1924 and wasn't found until 20 years later; and, William Stewart and Matthew Nelson, both who had gone over the wall with Touhy. The 10 convicts were working in the prison furniture factory that Friday in November, 1944 when they slugged four guards and tied them up. They hadn't planned to escape that day, but they had to push forward the escape plan when the ladder they were building was discovered. They stole a prison truck and speeded across the prison yard toward the southeast tower while holding a guard, Zoeth Skaggs, as a hostage. Four tower guards opened up at the moving truck with rifles. The guards fired more than two dozen shots not realizing that the gang had a hostage. Skaggs was the first man killed. But when the shooting stopped, four convicts had been wounded. Edward Robolois, one of the wounded men, died two days later from his wounds. The escapees had been armed with three homemade guns, two hatchets and several clubs made from iron pipe. Most of the gang ended up spending several years in isolation cells dreaming about the freedom that they really never even got close to that day. The escape dreams of the convicts from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s aren't much different from the dreams of the inmates in the 1980s. They still want out. In 1983, Randy Velleff and Patrick Cecconi went over Stateville's wall early on New Year's morning by using a 40-foot rope braided from bed sheets. They enjoyed three months of freedom. Cecconi was captured on March 3 in Charlotte, N.C., and Velleff was arrested two days later in Dallas, Texas. In February, 1987, Daniel Duane escaped from Stateville by hiding in a truck being used by a movie crew. At the time, scenes for the movie ""Weeds,'' which stars Nick Nolte, were being shot inside the prison. Duane, who had previously escaped from another state prison and had been free for almost a year, was found a few days after his escape. He was arrested in South Dakota driving a car that had been stolen in Joliet. He was returned to his Stateville cell. And the escape dreams of tough guys behind the walls here continue. So do the front page stories of the Herald-News that captures those dreams for local history. A postscript: Dave Hass, the Opinion Page editor, and I have spent the last six months researching old Herald-News pages about some of the characters who made news as they did their prison time. We hope to someday turn this research into a book titled ""Tough Guys Behind the Walls at Joliet.''