Hardboiled

     For many new Richmonders and visitors to our city, the idea that there was once an enormous walled prison in the middle of downtown is unbelievable. The fact that the sprawling assembly of buildings was utterly erased and replaced by nothing more threatening than a grass meadow makes it especially hard to visualize that vast warehouse of criminals and misery. From 1804 to 1990, the Virginia State Penitentiary saw thousands of inmates come and go, and many never left the grim old facility alive, dying of old age, murder, or execution by the Commonwealth. The vast majority served their time and were released. There was a third, even more desperate option other than legal release or death, and that was escape. 

The Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond as it appeared in 1982. Belvedere St. is at the top of the photograph and the Downtown Expressway ran parallel to the northern wall of the facility.

             Ralph Scott “Stony” Stonebreaker (whose very name conjures up visions of chain gangs) was born in a tiny crossroads town in north-east West Virginia in 1910, one of twelve siblings. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, and the 1930 Census found him serving at Fort Eustis in Newport News. Army life apparently held no more attraction for Stonebreaker than farming in rural West Virginia, and he and another soldier, Charles Panella, embarked on a crime spree in late 1931. Stonebreaker and Panella committed a series of four robberies on the Peninsula and two gas station holdups in Richmond. The authorities in Warwick County commented at the time that they would be glad when the pair were taken to the State Penitentiary because they were among a group of twelve inmates who almost escaped from the County jail.

 

Ralph Scott “Stony” Stonebreaker. Stony finally managed to escape prison, but not in the way he expected.

       Stonebreaker’s accomplice, Charles Panella, age 23, was an Italian immigrant with a definite distaste for detention but faced a combined fifty-eight-year term for his role in the heists with Stonebreaker. Just two months into his sentence on January 25, 1932, Panella was out on the prison yard and spotted a half-inch electrical conduit running up one of the Penitentiary’s tall brick walls. A former boxer, the agile Panella deftly climbed up and over the wall using the conduit while a hundred cheering inmates watched him, then scrambled down a barred window on the other side, scaled the outer wall, and fled under a fusillade of shots from the guard towers. He was last seen running down an alley near Fourth and Canal Streets but disappeared from Richmond entirely despite a massive search across the city. It would be three months before Panella was caught by a cop in Hampton, having robbed a business and then hijacked a getaway car at gunpoint. He was returned to the Penitentiary.

 

Charles Panella, Stonebreaker’s partner in a crime spree.

Two months later and perhaps impressed by Panella’s ability to literally run away from the Penitentiary and get away with it, Panella’s pal “Stony” Stonebreaker decided it was his turn to take a chance at freedom. Robert McDonald was convicted of murder and arson after killing a man in Louisa County then burning his house down around the body. On June 22, 1932, he and Stonebreaker were returning from the mess hall when they spotted a prison truck parked inside the walls, partially loaded with sheet steel to be made into license plates. Jumping in the truck, they started it and barreled across the prison grounds toward the massive wooden gate. When they hit it burst open with the weight of the heavy truck and the two convicts plowed through the gate and down Spring Street, onto Belvedere, and turned south. Abandoning the truck, the pair ran through the Oregon Hill neighborhood until they got to the Hollywood Cemetery fence along South Cherry Street.

Robert McDonald, who with Stonebreaker rammed their way out of the Pen.

There was a Confederate reunion going on in Richmond that week, and the two escapees were spotted in the distance trotting through the tombstones and trees by visitors touring the Hollywood Cemetery Confederate section. Dozens of armed Penitentiary guards and personnel flooded the cemetery looking for the pair. By 2:00 PM they still had not been located, and Prison Superintendent Major Rice Youell sent word to the prison in Goochland County to send bloodhounds to Richmond to find Stonebreaker and McDonald. The dogs arrived at 3:50 and were immediately released and led authorities out of Hollywood and into adjacent Mount Cavalry Cemetery. Stonebreaker and McDonald lay under a cover of vines and bushes in the northeast corner of the cemetery listening to the commotion and baying of the bloodhounds until flushed out by police with drawn guns and returned to prison after several hours of freedom.

 

“Big Dutch” Arthur Misunas of the infamous “Tri-State Gang,” outside a Richmond courtroom in 1934. Misunas had no illusions about his status as a rat and was prepared for the “Tri-State Avengers.”

Two of Stonebreaker’s prison pals became even more notorious three years later when McDonald, Panella, and another man, Bill Lynn (termed “two tough holdup men and a moron murderer” in the Times-Dispatch), attacked Arthur Misunas in the mess hall. Misunas was one of the few survivors of the infamous Tri-State Gang which engineered a series of truck hijackings, robberies, kidnappings, and murders up and down the East Coast in the early 1930s. The other two principals of the gang, Walter Legenza and Robert Mais, had been put to death in Virginia’s electric chair on February 2, 1935, largely because of Misunas’ testimony. In the Virginia Pen, “Big Dutch” Misunas was considered the biggest and most despised rat of them all. Four days after the executions, the trio attempted to kill Misunas, who, defending himself with a homemade knife made from half a pair of scissors, instead stabbed Panella in the stomach and then calmly “retired to his cell.” Following closely on accounts of the electrocution of Mais and Legenza, the story of the failed “Tri-State Avengers” made national news on the wire services.

For Richmonders living in Oregon Hill, just to the west of the Penitentiary, the howl of the prison siren must have been a rare and exciting sound. Rarely did the hulking collection of buildings on the other side of Belvedere emit anything other than routine vehicle traffic in and out of the gate, with supplies arriving by truck and the prison bus transporting inmates to court or a local hospital. Imagine the excitement on June 16, 1936, when the siren began, followed by the heavy thud of a shotgun echoing around the walls of the prison, and then immediately after that, the unmistakable rattle of a machine gun. Stony Stonebreaker was making his play for freedom again, only this time he had a lot more help.

Excited Oregon Hill residents gather in the 500 block of Spring Street at the sound of machine gun fire coming from the nearby State Pen. On the other side of the wall, Stony and his pals were making their play.

 

Robert Reams, prison guard, had no hint that things were about to go so very badly that afternoon. It was a clear and warm, a pleasant day for baseball, and about 150 inmates were out on the yard either playing or watching the game. Abruptly, Reams had a knife put to his throat and heard somebody behind him say, “git in the truck.” His hands bound, Reams was unceremoniously thrown in the back of a prison van and found another guard, Powhatan Bass, and a prison trusty named Oscar Fields already tied up on the floor. Eight inmates piled in the truck with them, someone started it, and the tall, black truck roared out of the automotive shop and toward the prison gate – the same gate that Stony and his pal McDonald had driven through four years before, only now reinforced with a heavy steel beam.

 

Prison guard O.C. Smith, didn’t hesitate in unleashing a torrent of gunfire into the escapee’s truck, killing and wounding prisoners and hostages alike.

Patrolling on top of the wall was guard O.C. Smith, a no-nonsense veteran officer hardened by years of working at the Penitentiary. Looking down from his vantage point, it was obvious that the person behind the wheel was not supposed to be there and this was an escape attempt. Smith knew what to do. Drawing his service revolver, he quickly emptied it into the truck below him, and then grabbed a shotgun from the guard post. Pumping it rapidly, he shot the truck six times with buckshot (each round carrying nine pellets the size of a pistol bullet). The truck was still moving, so Smith dropped the shotgun and picked up a Thompson sub-machine gun, hauled back on the cocking handle, and fired a long burst of .45 caliber bullets into the now slowing truck as it finally bumped harmlessly into the gate and stopped.

 

Prison guards examine the truck that was riddled with bullets by O.C. Smith.

As Smith’s Thompson roared, inside the truck dots of daylight appeared all over the walls as bullets zipped through it and bloody pandemonium broke out. An inmate named Debie Coleman slumped unconscious, a bullet through his head. Coleman would die of his wounds two weeks later. Bill Lynn, a Texas bank robber and one of Misunas’ assailants, was shot in the back and leg and George Ferguson, a convicted murderer, was badly wounded in both legs. The hapless trustee Fields who had no part in the attempted escape was shot in the stomach. Bank robber Talmadge Feazell had flesh wounds, but the guard, Robert Reams, was hit in the mouth by a slug and had a bullet wound in his hip. His fellow guard, Powhatan Bass, lay dead beside him on the floor of the truck, shot several times in the head and body. The truck sat in front of the gate and was instantly surrounded by guards with shotguns and the doors flung open. A murderer named Burley Wright, bank robbers Ed Veal and John Price, and Ralph “Stony” Stonebreaker emerged from the carnage in the blood-spattered, bullet-riddled truck, unscathed and with hands held high.

The gravestone of prison guard and hostage Powhatan Bass in Maury Cemetery, killed in the volley of machine gun fire that ended the escape attempt. (Photo from Find a Grave)

The City of Richmond tried to convict the attempted escapees with murder in the death of Powhatan Bass, with District Attorney Gray Haddon announcing he would seek the death penalty for Stonebreaker and the other three who were not wounded in the attempt. The question of where Bass was in the truck and when exactly he was killed in the fusillade of bullets clouded the prosecution, and murder charges were eventually dropped against the convicts. Guard O.C. Smith was roundly praised for following regulations and his part in thwarting the escape, even if it cost Powhatan Bass his life.

Stonebreaker attempted, again and again, to get out of prison throughout the 1940s by using legal means, claiming that he was denied due process when first convicted of his crime spree back in 1932. He staged a five-year court battle (financed by an inheritance he received while he was in prison) that became known in the press as “the famous Ralph Stonebreaker case.” Eventually the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the charges be dismissed. This left the uncomfortable fact that, by 1947 Stonebreaker served nine years too many. In June, 1948, at age 37, Ralph Stonebreaker was released from prison.

Stony Stonebreaker was just as hard-looking as an older man as he was in his prison mug shot. (Photo from Find a Grave)

 

According to his entry on the “Find a Grave” website, Ralph remarried (his first wife had divorced him in 1934) and had two children. In 1950, he was living in Cumberland, Maryland, and worked at Memorial Hospital. Ralph “Stony” Stonebreaker died in 1992 at the age of 81. The hardboiled old ex-con is buried in the cemetery of a small rural church in western Maryland in an unmarked grave.

 

 - Selden

 

See also the Shockoe Examiner’s tour of the inside of the Penitentiary before it was demolished in 1991.