Lee Smart, a teenage murderer, was 19 years old when he joined with Jerry Myles in a violent takeover of Montana State Prison on April 16, 1959.

By Kevin S. Giles

(c) copyright Kevin S. Giles

(I derived the following material from my prison memoir, Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance. My investigation into Lee Smart included personal interviews with people who knew him and research of documents related to his crimes. Jerry’s Riot, written from interviews with dozens of eyewitnesses, remains the only authoritative and copyrighted source of information about the riot.)

Jerry’s Riot tells the story of the 1959 takeover of Montana State Prison by career criminal Jerry Myles and his 19-year-old boyfriend, Lee Smart.

Today’s criminal laws would prohibit sending a 16-year-old boy to prison where he mingled with adult men. Yet that very thing happened in 1956 in the strange case of murderer Lee Smart.

The teenager’s romantic interest in a hardened career criminal more than twice his age led to a deadly takeover of Montana State Prison in April 1959.

Smart, 19, and his co-conspirator Jerry Myles seized the prison for thirty-six hours. Myles, a recognized sociopath, wanted glory. Smart’s motive hinged on his mistaken belief that Myles would help him escape.

Murder came natural to Lee Smart

To many people in law enforcement and corrections, Smart seemed a born killer. He came to the prison in Deer Lodge after killing a traveling salesman while on the run from a juvenile detention center in Washington state. When the prison disturbance began, he killed again. To this young drifter, murder came as natural as breathing. To him, rebelling against authority fed his taste for violence.

BUY! Jerry's Riot

When I researched Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance, I found Smart’s younger brother and called him at his home. The conversation was short. “I heard he died in Montana in a prison riot,” was about all the brother wanted to say. He denied knowing anything about Lee’s upbringing. I already knew some details about Lee’s early life from what I had read in the newspapers and legal documents. I had hoped for something more personal.

Of the many players in the 1959 disturbance, widely called a “riot” then and now, Smart remains the greatest mystery. Not what he did, but why he did it, that compels curiosity. How could a boy kill dispassionately and without provocation?

He was 16 in a prison of men

He’s not without company. In recent memory we know of school shooters and the occasional well-publicized “lone wolf” who fancy guns and conspiracy theories. News organizations these days are more inclined to probe into a murderous teenager’s mental state and family background. There was little of that in Smart’s day.

What we do know is that Smart’s mother came to Deer Lodge, after his conviction, to appeal to the warden to treat her killer son like the boy he was. We can blame her futility on the 1950s standard in Montana corrections that what was good for one inmate was good for all. In those days, “classification” hadn’t taken hold in Montana prison policy. The prison didn’t separate inmates by nature and severity of crime, nor by age, which means that young Smart fell into a stew of adult forgers, rapists, killers, burglars, child molesters, swindlers and so forth.

Separating him might have prevented the prison riot but it’s doubtful he needed protection. His record indicates he was as bad as the worst of the men.

Even Myles, who led mutinies in federal prisons, hadn’t committed murder.

Smart and Myles were an unlikely couple

Their mutual attraction is well-documented by anecdote. Guards from that era recall having to assign Myles and Smart to cells situated sufficiently apart from one another because of “liaisons” that were reported. Some said they were “caught in the act” more than once. Whatever the exact nature of their relationship, the devious Myles saw in Smart a maniacal tool he could manipulate.

Neither man survived the riot. I explain, in Jerry’s Riot, how the crisis unfolded.

I was a young boy at the time. I recall my father driving us to the cemetery to see Smart’s grave. Dusk settled on a cold day after heavy snow had fallen. As we watched from the idling car, he kicked snow from the headstone with his boot. It struck me hard that the riot killer, newly buried, laid six feet below my dad.

Years later, as I researched Jerry’s Riot, I again went to the cemetery after checking location records at the funeral home. I couldn’t find the headstone. I went back to the funeral home to again look at the map of graves. “He didn’t get up and run away,” the director told me.

His missing grave adds to mystery

I came away with two possible conclusions. In the first, turf grew over the headstone, burying it. This was plausible considering Smart’s mother had died decades earlier and probably no family member since had cared for his grave. In the second, a morbid treasure hunter stole the headstone.

Given continuing fascination with the life and death of Lee Smart, I think the second conclusion is probably the accurate one.

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Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.