Christmas to Life Termer Empty, Black, Day of Dreams of What Might Have Been

1922

(International News Service.)

STATE PENITENTIARY. JOLIET, ILL.. Dec. 25. — Christmas to a "lifer" behind prison walls — empty, black, a day saddened by memories of what was and dreams of what might have been.

True there's a special dinner, a movie perhaps, but what's that?

Friends, relatives, loved ones make Christmas. Without them the day is meaningless. So said two convicted murderers here today. They're in for life. To them, Christmas, like any other day, means only iron bars, bleak stone walls, wasted lives.

There's prisoner No. 8383. He's 24, a farmer boy. Never before has he eaten a Christmas dinner away from his mother's table.

Last August, crazed with bad liquor, he murdered his bride of four months. Three weeks ago he was brought here. He changed his name for a number.

His face is frank, open, boyish. His hands are nervous, twitching — twitching because their owner is just beginning to realize the enormity of the crime they committed.

"I never was in trouble before," he said, thinking back over many cheerful Christmas days spent at his home near Morris, Ill., and of four happy months with his young wife, "the only girl I ever went with."

"I was raised just as well as any boy in the country," he said. "I had a good education. I never drank before. Now everything is swept away. It's sad. When I think of it I almost go crazy."

"Christmas?" queried another "lifer" convicted in 1913 of murdering an actress in a Chicago hotel. "Well, it's just about like any other day."

His voice was weak, submissive. And he laughed, a hollow meaningless laugh. Six years in prison have made him that way.

Three possessions he has in the world — his life, which is useless to him unless he can gain his freedom: a small picture, a reproduction of a hotel cash book with which be once had a faint hope he might prove he was innocent of the crime of which he was declared guilty, and $170 in money, not enough to engage a good lawyer to handle his case.

Several years ago this prisoner, then a trusty, walked away from the prison farm. His sole idea was to earn enough money to prove his innocence. He was missing three years. In Seattle he made good. But one day he was recognized by a detective, picked up and brought back to Joliet. He had $170, saved from a salary never more than $2.50 a week.

All this he confided on condition that neither his name nor his number be made known.

"I don't want to beg for sympathy," he said, "if I only had a friend outside who would do something for me. But there is no one. I am getting old. Freedom is a wonderful thing."

Tears welled into his sad eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.

Then he walked away to his cell, there to contemplate another black Christmas — only another day of memories and of dreams that never come true.

—The Lincoln Star, Lincoln, NE, Dec. 25, 1922, p. 7.