Category Archives: Prison stories

Selected stories about Old Montana Prison, the scene of the compelling book Jerry’s Riot.

‘Walking the wall’ meant seeing Montana’s prison from a tower guard’s point of view

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Photo shows state troopers at Montana State Prison

My dad, Murry Giles, is shown kneeling and steadying the ladder outside Tower 7 the night of April 16, 1959. Armed state troopers climbed atop the wall to discourage inmates from attempting to break out. Tower 7, known also as “the main gate,” had fortified doors at street level that led into the prison. New prisoners walked through those doors to a life in the bars. Photo/Old Montana Prison

By Kevin S. Giles

Do high places bother you? Would you walk on a narrow wall 22 feet above the sidewalk? A wall lacking a railing?

When I read my father’s Montana State Prison hiring papers from 1958, after he applied for a guard job, handwriting near the bottom caught my eye. “Walked the wall OK,” someone wrote.

BUY! Jerry's Riot

I didn’t fully grasp the significance of that notation until I began researching for my book, Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance, years later. The prison required applicants to “walk the wall” because tower guards rotated after an hour or two. Whether performing this feat was seen by administrators as a practical skill or a test of courage, I don’t know. The date on my dad’s application shows he walked the wall in winter. How did he avoid falling?

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Inside story: when bold rioting convicts took control of Montana State Prison

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Prison mug shot of Jerry Myles

Jerry Myles was a stubby, intelligent career criminal who planned the April 16, 1959, takeover in defiance of new ‘reform’ Warden Floyd Powell. Photo by Kevin Giles

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By Kevin S. Giles

Sixty years ago, a deadly uprising at Montana State Prison began when two dangerous inmates doused a guard in Cell House 1 with gasoline and threatened to set him afire with a flaming mop. The inmates took the guard’s rifle and several rounds of ammunition and then, over the next few hours, gained control of the entire prison.

When inmates control the prison …

That riot began on Thursday, April 16, 1959. It ended 36 hours later.

Cover of 'Jerry's Riot'

This memoir by Kevin S. Giles details the 1959 disturbance at Montana State Prison and events leading to it.

Those troublesome inmates were Jerry Myles and Lee Smart, both psychopaths. Myles was the mastermind. He was a career burglar and an intelligent conniver. His ability to break rules and lead inmate mutinies resulted in his incarceration in three federal prisons, including Alcatraz. Smart was a runaway delinquent who, on impulse, became a teenage murderer. Guards who knew the men said they were lovers.

Smart shot and killed Deputy Warden Ted Rothe in his office inside the walls. Myles slashed a sergeant with a knife, seriously injuring him. They took 26 hostages, both guards and civilians, threatening to burn them alive or hang them from the cell house galleys. Minutes after the National Guard begin a barrage of rocket fire from the west wall of the prison yard, Myles shot Smart and then himself in the northwest corner of Cell House 1.

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Echoes and ghosts: Montana prison women left teardrops on the cell house floor

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Photo of female Montana prison inmate

One of the youngest women ever held at Montana State Prison was Evelyn Donges, then 16. She was convicted for luring a man into a robbery on September 11, 1951. He was beaten and later died.

(This story first appeared in the Sunday features section of the Helena, Mont., Independent Record. I wrote it after women held captive at Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge were moved elsewhere. In those days, the women’s unit held only few female offenders. Today, Montana has about 200 inmates in the women’s unit, now in Billings.)

By Kevin S. Giles

DEER LODGE, Mont. — It was a long time ago, it seems, when the women were here.

The row of empty cells – four of them – are dark and damp.

One is empty. Its mattress is rolled and stacked at one end of the bunk, which is cyclone fencing stretched across a metal frame.

In another, books of salvation are scattered across the bed. The gleam of a faraway window bounces off one cover, illuminating its title: Prison to Praise.

A third is the home of a ghost. The bedding has been thrown aside, as if the cell’s occupant was startled by the cold metallic clank of a cell door, and stood for a smoke, or awakened by a nightmare of the past.

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Tales of Froggy, Turkey Pete and ghosts of other old Montana prison convicts

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By Kevin S. Giles

We squinted at the wind-chapped brick, trying to decipher some of the nicknames carved into it.

“Right there!” said the old guard, jabbing impatiently with his finger, and I knew he was waiting to tell me a story. “That one!”

He pushed me closer to the wall, pointing again to a crude carving. I saw it, sure enough. “Froggy,” it read, but I didn’t know the name and when I shrugged, he seemed grateful for my ignorance.

The old guard tore into a checkered tale, staining the air with his blue language. The story he told described a convict who had spent a half-century at the Old Montana Prison in Deer Lodge, Montana. He had been an accomplice in a sensational 1959 riot. It was a blood-letting; three people died.

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Cement shoes? In a Montana prison riot? It’s fantasy made for television

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Photo shows cement shoes

Cement shoes, on display at Old Montana Prison, made a prop for a Travel Channel video, but there’s no evidence they had anything to do with inmate Jerry Myles and the 1959 riot.

By Kevin S. Giles

A friend called me recently to ask if I had seen a Travel Channel feature about the 1959 riot at Montana State Prison that aired that night.

“Tell me it’s not the urban myth about Jerry Myles and the cement shoes,” I interrupted.

Sure enough, that was the one, contrived and cartoonish straight through to its overwrought (but merciful) ending 3:31 minutes later. This Mysteries in the Museum stinker surely provided entertainment value to some viewers. Who wouldn’t marvel at watching an angry convict start a prison disturbance because guards made him wear shoes with heavy cement soles?

Quite a story – but not true.

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Lyle Gillette: Retired Montana teacher stood for kids, now needs help himself

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Photo shows Montana prison tour

Lyle Gillette, in the purple cap at left, briefs people inside Old Montana Prison before beginning a tour in 2009. He led tours inside the prison, now a museum, for years. Many of the people attending this particular tour were participants (or their relatives) in the 1959 prison riot. The Montana National Guard ended it after three days. (Photo by Kevin S. Giles)

(Sad update: Lyle Gillette died Aug. 21, 2015 after, his son reported, five days of terrible pain.)

By Kevin S. Giles

The first time I met Lyle Gillette we were a rowdy bunch, some of us more than others, as he took charge of our eighth-grade gym class.

We wore red gym trunks that we stored with our tennis shoes and jock straps in wire baskets in the basement below the basketball floor. Every so often, when the air in the locker room ripened, Lyle would get after us for neglecting the washing machine.

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Ed “Bus” Ellsworth: A National Guard colonel recalls a deadly Montana prison riot

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Guards at prison

Victor Baldwin, shown fourth from right in this 1970s photo, survived being taken hostage in 1959. Many of these guards shown here were involved in the riot or began work at the prison soon afterwards. Photo permitted by Don DeYott of Montana State Prison

By Kevin S. Giles

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 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.

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‘You can read (or watch) Shawshank Redemption forty times and learn less of real prison life in the era than in a chapter of this book.’

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Jerry’s Riot is a nonfiction account of Montana’s notorious 1959 prison riot. It is the only accurate and comprehensive book written about the disturbance because journalist Kevin S. Giles interviewed nearly 100 people who witnessed it.

The book 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, Montana. Myles wanted to run the prison. Powell wanted to reform it. Guards and prisoners were caught in the middle.

True crime reviewer Laura James said Giles, a Montana author, joined a national echelon of writers who have written convincing and haunting works in the true crime genre. James wrote in her review:

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Wife of a prison hostage recalls details from Montana’s deadly 1959 riot

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Photo shows former prison hostage

Everett “Guff” Felix and his wife Amy Lee shown in the Bitterroot Valley in Western Montana where they lived after the 1959 riot. Guff was a captain and taken hostage. He never went back to Montana State Prison. (Photo by Kevin Giles)

By Kevin S. Giles

Recently I discovered that Amy Lee Felix had died. In reading her obituary I remembered, in some detail, visiting her home in the mid-1990s in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. I was there to interview Amy’s husband, Everett “Guff” Felix, who had a remarkable story to tell about being held hostage during the 1959 prison riot in Deer Lodge.

Guff would be remembered as the highest-ranking officer taken hostage when the riot began on April 16. He was a captain then, just a few years after he closed his restaurant and began looking for work, hardly prepared by his own admittance to deal with rioting prisoners.

I took the following from a letter Amy wrote me in 1996. It shows what Guff faced as the prison’s new captain: Continue reading →

Writing Jerry’s Riot: Eyewitnesses recalled danger, intrigue, even a bit of compassion

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By Kevin S. Giles

Readers often ask how I found the high level of detail that appears in Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance.

The short answer is this: from people who were there. The longer answer is a bit more complicated.

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