Robert Franklin Stroud

American murderer and ornithologist

• Born: January 28, 1890
• Birthplace: Seattle, Washington
• Died: November 21, 1963
• Place of death: Springfield, Missouri

Major offenses: Murders of a bartender and a prison guard

Active: January 18, 1909, and March 26, 1916.

Locale: Juneau, Alaska, and Leavenworth, Kansas

Sentence: Twelve years’ imprisonment for the first murder; death by hanging for the second, commuted to life imprisonment without parole

Early Life

Robert Franklin Stroud (strowd) was born into a dysfunctional family. His father had a weakness for alcohol and women, and his mother, who had been badly abused in her first marriage, became distraught when her second husband, during bouts of drunkenness, beat the young boy and threatened to kill the entire family. As a child, Stroud was often ill, and his mother’s oversolicitousness hampered his social development and contributed to his misery in school, which he attended only through the third grade. Stroud often found himself in the role of protector of his two half sisters and younger brother against his father and local bullies. When Stroud was thirteen, the family broke apart over his father’s affair with a neighbor woman, and Stroud left home to pursue, as he said, the life of “a great American bum.” He returned to Seattle periodically only to discover that his father, who had rejoined the family, continued to drink heavily and mistreat his wife and children. After a particularly violent quarrel with his father in 1908, Robert left for Alaska, where he hoped to get a job in railroad construction.

Criminal Career

In Cordova, Alaska, a boom town with twenty-six saloons, Stroud met Kitty O’Brien, a thirty-six-year-old dance-hall entertainer and, according to some accounts, a prostitute. Their relationship continued in Juneau, where Kitty found work in a cabaret, but it ended tragically when Stroud killed their mutual acquaintance, F. K. “Charlie” Von Dahmer, who had viciously beaten and robbed Kitty in Stroud’s absence. After turning himself in to the city marshal, Stroud, together with Kitty (whose revolver had been the murder weapon) found himself indicted for first-degree murder. Eventually Stroud’s plea of manslaughter was accepted, and the case against Kitty was dropped for lack of evidence. On August 23, 1909, a judge sentenced Stroud to twelve years in the penitentiary on MacNeil Island in Puget Sound.

Frustrated by the harsh sentence for what he considered justifiable homicide, Stroud hurt his chances for parole by such violent acts as stabbing an inmate who had accused him of stealing food and assaulting an orderly who had reported him for trying to obtain drugs. Stroud’s hurtful behavior resulted in his transfer to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas on September 5, 1912. There, a prison doctor diagnosed his kidney disease, which was treated through medicines and diet. Stroud also began studying foreign languages, physics, mathematics, and music; he also looked forward to a visit from his younger brother, whom he had not seen in eight years.

Because of a minor infraction, Andrew F. Turner, a new guard, placed Stroud on report, thus vitiating his visiting privileges. On March 26, 1916, in the dining hall filled with more than one thousand inmates, Stroud stabbed and killed Turner.

Legal Action and Outcome

Stroud was quickly tried and convicted of murder, and on May 27, 1916, he was sentenced to death by hanging. However, because the jury had been improperly charged, the trial and sentence were nullified, precipitating a series of legal battles involving a new trial and various appeals. Finally, in 1920, Stroud was again sentenced to be hanged, but his mother appealed to President Woodrow Wilson and especially to Wilson’s wife, Edith Wilson; Edith’s influence helped commute Stroud’s death sentence to life imprisonment without any possibility of parole.

Birdman of Leavenworth

Disappointed by the president’s action, Leavenworth’s warden placed Stroud in isolation. However, it was not long before Stroud had companionship when, in the exercise yard, he found a broken branch that contained a nest of fledgling sparrows. He brought them back to his cell and nursed them to health. He began reading about birds, their food, habits, and diseases, and he soon got permission to raise canaries. A new warden encouraged Stroud’s interests by allowing him to obtain cages, chemicals, and other scientific equipment through which he conducted increasingly sophisticated investigations. He was even able to go into business by selling some of the canaries he bred and the remedies he developed for various avian diseases.

Based on his research, Stroud wrote articles for such publications as Roller Canary Journal. It was through his piece on “Hemorrhagic Septicemia in Canaries” that he eventually met Della Mae Jones, who later moved from Indiana to Kansas, where she helped manage Stroud’s business ventures. In 1933, Jones disclosed that she had secretly married Stroud, but this “contract marriage” alienated both prison officials and Stroud’s mother. These officials were also annoyed when the manuscripts of two of Stroud’s books were smuggled out of Leavenworth and published: Diseases of Canaries (1933), which had been introduced through a bird magazine in 1933, and Stroud’s Digest of the Diseases of Birds, which was published in 1943, after Stroud had been transferred to Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay. Stroud’s prison transfer may have been caused by these publications, his lack of appreciation for all his privileges, and his continued criminal behavior, including his use of chemicals and apparatus to make alcohol, as well as his physical attacks against guards.

Stroud was not allowed to bring his birds and scientific equipment to Alcatraz. Since he could no longer experiment with birds in his new D Block home, he studied law books with the goal of trying to get his convictions overturned. He also wrote two books—an autobiography and a history of the American penal system, but the warden forbade their publication. Though he did not participate in the prison riot of 1946, which was quelled by eighty Marines, Stroud accused the prison bureau of trying to murder him through its purposeless bombing of D Block.

As he aged, Stroud’s health problems multiplied, and in 1959 he was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, where he died of natural causes in 1963. Morton Sobell, a fellow inmate and a convicted spy, discovered the body.

Impact

Although most of his fifty-four years of incarceration were spent in isolation, Robert Franklin Stroud managed, through his ornithological publications, to have a positive influence on bird lovers and avian veterinarians. However, a year before his death, in 1962, his life and work achieved worldwide fame with the release of a successful film titled Birdman of Alcatraz, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Burt Lancaster as Stroud. Stroud was not allowed to see the film, which was nominated for several Academy Awards and which led to renewed petitions for his release. When an Alcatraz inmate heard of this campaign to free Stroud, he opined: “They don’t want to pardon Robert Stroud; they want to pardon Burt Lancaster.” Lancaster portrayed Stroud as a gentle and humane amateur scientist and writer, which ran counter to the views of many prison officials that he was an unrepentant killer with a propensity for violence, child pornography, and other unsavory behavior.

In the years following the film and Stroud’s death, journalists and biographers have wrestled with the contradictions in the amateur birdman’s character. Some have emphasized his intelligence (he did have an IQ of 134), his courage in overcoming obstacles imposed by prison regulations, and his insights on bird diseases. Some of his most important supporters, such as his mother, abandoned him, but others remained loyal to the story of a very bad man who discovered redemption through the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Bibliography

Babyak, Jolene. Birdman: The Many Faces of Robert Stroud. Berkeley, Calif.: Ariel Books, 1994. Using Stroud’s prison records and interviews with guards and inmates who knew him, Babyak, a warden’s daughter, presents a balanced view of his life and scientific contributions.

Esslinger, Michael. Alcatraz: A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years. Ipswich, Mass.: Ocean View, 2003. Praised for its meticulous scholarship, this book contains several pages on the real and fictionalized Stroud. Illustrated with photographs. Index.

Gaddis, Thomas E. The Birdman of Alcatraz: The Story of Robert Stroud. Mattituck, N.Y.: Aeonian Press, 1976. This reprint, which contains the author’s update covering Stroud’s life from 1954 to 1962, also has the original text published by Random House in 1955. This book was the source of the film, but it has to be used cautiously since it depends heavily on Gaddis’s conversations with Stroud. No index.

Presnall, Judith Janda. Life on Alcatraz. San Diego: Lucent Books, 2001. This book, part of “The Way People Live” series, aims to understand prison culture through an analysis of the daily routine and personal struggles of inmates. Stroud’s criminal career, his bird studies at Leavenworth, and his isolation in D Block of Alcatraz are analyzed. Sections on further reading and works consulted. Index.