13 days in a sewer
By: Dale M. Brumfield
Tags: Mass Incarceration, History, Virginia Penitentiary, Cultural Archaeology, Criminal Justice Reform

13 days in a sewer

A real-life Shawshank Redemption

Richmond’s 14th Street Bridge, leading to Manchester and Vaden’s Store.

In the Stephen King novella “The Shawshank Redemption,” wrongfully convicted inmate Andy Dufresne patiently spends 19 years chipping with a small rock hammer a hole through a prison cell wall, which he keeps covered with a poster of Rita Hayworth.

He eventually escapes out the hole through a sewer before plunging into a filthy pond of farm run-off. Afterward, he successfully makes it to Mexico.

Walter Stiars’ daring 1906 escape from the Virginia State Penitentiary bears many similarities to Dufresne’s experiences, including a daring nighttime getaway through a sewer. And like Dufresne, Stiars was never recaptured.

Desk job

On February 28, 1905, the Manchester Corporation Court in Richmond sentenced Lynchburg native Walter E. Stiars, age 30, to eight years in the penitentiary on two counts of breaking and entering B. P. Vaden’s Hardware Store in Manchester. Penitentiary officials considered Stiars dangerous and an escape risk — he bragged to the guards upon his admission that the penitentiary would never hold him.

He had good reason to be labeled a risk — he had convictions pending in West Virginia and Tennessee for stealing $1,200 worth of jewelry, amounting to over 20 total years of prison time.

Since the penitentiary at that time contracted other manufacturing companies to set up shop on the grounds to employ inmates, officials assigned Stiars to work at a desk in the shipping office of the Davis Boot and Shoe Company to keep him under surveillance and mostly, away from hand tools. For months Stiars quietly worked at a desk, using his meager earnings to purchase snacks and canned goods. He also memorized the habits of the guards charged to watch him.

The noon dinner bell rang as usual on Saturday, June 16, 1906. During roll call, Stiars did not answer “adsum” (Latin for “to be present,” and commonly used by inmates at the time) when his name was called. The alarm was sounded, and a thorough search revealed he was nowhere on the premises. The search left nothing unturned — packing boxes were opened and searched, and blanket, shoe, and coat stacks were prodded.

Outgoing barrels and boxes of manufactured goods were opened and examined. It was assumed that if Stiars did not get out in a shoe crate or a barrel then he must have been hiding, as there were no signs of an escape. Still, penitentiary officials posted extra guards along the outer walls just in case he somehow bolted the previous evening. After several days they were withdrawn, as it was not believed that a convict could remain so completely hidden that long.

If Stiars had escaped, Penitentiary Superintendent Captain Evan F. Morgan was confident he would be captured. “We expect to land him,” Morgan told the June 17 Richmond Times-Dispatch, “and if I am not mistaken we will not be long about it.”

Morgan was mistaken. Stiars had not escaped — not yet. He was indeed hiding.

Through Aladdin’s lamp

On the evening of June 15th, right around quitting time, Stiars stood up, walked away from his desk, leaving his coat and cap hanging on the wall.

He went to a closet in the corner of the office, removed a small wall board behind a waste pipe, then slithered under the floor into a filthy 22-inch high crawl space, replacing the board. The Times-Dispatch later recounted that Stiars “was swallowed up as effectually as though he had used Aladdin’s lamps.”

This is where Stiars lived and worked for an astonishing 13 straight days — under shoe factory no. 2, lying down in a wet, murky crawl space, surrounded by rats, cockroaches, the excruciating stench of two raw sewage troughs underneath a row of toilets, and the unbearable heat of a steam boiler directly overhead.

Fortified by the canned provisions and cigarettes he for months had been purchasing and stockpiling, Stiars worked slowly and deliberately with a chisel normally used to open shoe crates, chipping and cutting through a 24-inch brick exterior foundation wall.

Success

Finally, on June 28, between 6:30 p.m. and daybreak, Stiars broke through. He removed an iron ventilator grate and emerged undetected into the prison yard behind the shops below an unused guard tower.

Using a roll of webbing and a scaling hook, Stiars tied the webbing to the hook, threw it over the west wall, and started to climb over. According to an almost perfect human-shaped indentation in the soggy earth, he must have been almost over when the webbing broke and he fell over 15 feet to the ground.

Unfazed, Stiars walked back several yards to a nearby coal bin, removed a large board and used it with the webbing to scale the 18-foot wall. He then used the webbing to slide down the other side before disappearing into the Richmond night.

What the Penitentiary guards found. June 29, 1906 Richmond Times-Dispatch

Penitentiary officials first learned of the escape the next morning when a guard discovered the opening and a pile of rubble at the cellar wall. “How he lived in that awful hole for 13 days, I cannot understand,” Morgan claimed, simultaneously angered yet impressed, before offering a $100 reward for his capture.

The conditions in the sewer were so revolting that a guard named Penn and a white inmate went in but gave up after just a few minutes, retching from the blistering humidity and sickening stench. According to a press report, a “negro prisoner” was sent down instead, and in the filth discovered opened cans of meat, potted tongue, salmon, ham, tomatoes, sardines, crackers, and water, as well as cigarette butts, a knife, chisel, and a roll of webbing.

He also found a tattered edition of the Times-Dispatch newspaper and a copy of Charles Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend.” Stiars’ water supply was a steady drip from a rusty overhead toilet supply line.

It was believed (but never confirmed) that Stiars had a “confederate,” or an ally in his escape, as he broke out the first night after the night guards were withdrawn from the west wall.

The June 29, 1906, Richmond Times-Dispatch claimed Stiars’ escape had “no parallel in the history of criminal endeavor for freedom in this State.”

Diagram of Stiars’ escape. Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 29, 1906

Never caught in Richmond, Stiars made his way to Mansfield, Ohio, where he was arrested in April 1907 on a burglary charge. Before he could be extradited to Virginia, however, he escaped again, and in defiance of the words of Superintendent Morgan, he was never heard from again.

Perhaps he went to Mexico.

Postscript

Stiars’ tenacious and bizarre breakout led to the Virginia Penitentiary adopting the Bertillon system of measuring prisoners’ physical attributes, such as cranium width and length, torso, and forearm length for identification purposes. All inmates for years afterward were measured, with statistics entered into a binder titled “Anthropometric Measurements.” The practice of mug shots, or photographing inmates upon admittance began at the penitentiary at this time also, thanks to the audacious and successful escape of William Stiars.

Courtesy State Penitentiary collection, Library of Virginia

Read more at www.dalebrumfield.net. A portion of this story appears in my book “Virginia State Penitentiary: A Notorious History.”