Robert Stroud: The Violent Truth Behind the Birdman of Alcatraz

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Robert Stroud never kept a single bird at Alcatraz, and the gentle figure Burt Lancaster played on screen bears little resemblance to the man. Born in Seattle in 1890 to an abusive, alcoholic father, he ran away at 13 and by 18 was in Juneau, Alaska, working as a pimp. In January 1909 he knocked a bartender named Charlie von Dahmer unconscious in a dispute over an unpaid fee and a beating, then shot him dead. A manslaughter conviction brought 12 years at McNeil Island, where he stabbed one inmate and assaulted a hospital orderly before being moved to Leavenworth.

This episode follows him from the Leavenworth mess hall, where in 1916 he stabbed guard Andrew Turner through the heart in front of some 1,500 inmates, to a death sentence commuted by President Woodrow Wilson and a lifetime in solitary. There, in 1920, he found three injured sparrows in the yard. What followed was real science done with razor blades and broken glass, a mail-order business, and decades of calculated manipulation of the people holding him.

• He kept nearly 300 birds in his cells, wrote two respected manuscripts on avian disease, and found a treatment for hemorrhagic septicemia by dissecting the birds that died.
• When officials tried to shut him down in 1931, a petition with 50,000 signatures went to President Herbert Hoover, and he married Della Mae Jones by proxy to block a transfer under Kansas law.
• The marriage cost him his mother's support. She opposed his clemency bids until her death in 1938.
• Guards found he was using his laboratory equipment to distill alcohol, and in December 1942 he was given ten minutes' notice and shipped to Alcatraz, where pets were banned.
• An Alcatraz psychiatrist diagnosed him a psychopath in 1943. He died in 1963 at 73 after 54 years in custody, 42 of them in solitary confinement.