Tag Archives: Montana State Prison

The woeful Montana tale of mysterious boy killer Lee Smart, riot ringleader

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Photo shows riot ringleader Lee Smart

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.)

Photo shows cover of the book 'Jerry's Riot: The True Story of Montana's 1959 Prison Disturbance'

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.

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‘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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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 →