The last-known dwelling inmate to serve time in Alcatraz has revealed what haunted him most about being locked up on the infamous island jail that President Trump plans to reopen.
Charlie Hopkins, 93, was shipped off to the 22-acre island jail in 1955 for inflicting an issue at one other facility whereas serving 17 years for kidnapping and theft, he informed the BBC.
What he remembers most is the “deathly quiet” on the island that’s surrounded by the freezing, treacherous waters of the San Francisco Bay — with the one sound the whistle of passing ships.
“That’s a lonely sound,” Hopkins recalled. “It reminds you of Hank Williams singing that track, ‘I’m so lonesome I might cry.’”
Hopkins, now 93, mentioned his three years in Alcatraz have been excruciatingly mundane — leaving him so bored he would clear to cross the time, buffing the flooring “till they shined.”
“There was nothing to do,” he mentioned. “You might stroll backwards and forwards in your cell or do push-ups.”
Regardless of being locked up within the notoriously strict high-security jail, Hopkins mentioned he nonetheless discovered a approach to get himself into bother.
“You wouldn’t imagine the difficulty I triggered them after I was there,” he informed the outlet. “I can see now, trying again, that I had issues.”
Hopkins spent most of his days at Alcatraz locked in “D Block” — the solitary confinement part that housed troubled inmates who have been not often allowed to depart their cells.
His longest time on “D Block” was six months for being a part of a failed escape try with a number of different inmates — together with profession legal and infamous jail escapee Forrest Tucker.
Hopkins mentioned he stole a hacksaw from the jail’s electrical store for the boys to make use of to chop the jail bars within the basement kitchen to flee.
Nevertheless, the plan was spoiled when guards discovered the blades in one among his accomplices’ cells.
“A couple of days after they locked them up, they locked me up,” he recalled.
Following Hopkins’ failed try, increasingly inmates tried to flee Alcatraz over time, inflicting jail officers to extend safety.
“After I left there in 1958, the safety was so tight you couldn’t breathe,” he mentioned.
Hopkins served out the rest of his sentence in a jail in Missouri and was launched in 1963 — the identical 12 months Alcatraz was shut down.
Throughout its 29 years of operation, there have been 14 documented escape makes an attempt from Alcatraz jail, in line with the FBI.
Of the 36 males who tried, solely three are suspected of presumably escaping the Island: Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin.
Within the early morning hours of June 12, 1962, utilizing the dummy heads they crafted to make it seem as in the event that they have been sleeping of their cells, the boys escaped by a gap of their cell partitions, accessing a utility hall, and climbing to the roof by a air flow duct.
Regardless of none of their our bodies ever turning up within the bay, they have been declared legally lifeless in 1979 after the FBI concluded they most definitely drowned. Their story was made notorious within the film “Escape from Alcatraz” starring Clint Eastwood, the identical 12 months they have been declared lifeless.
Hopkins, who now lives in Florida, mentioned the San Francisco Nationwide Archives knowledgeable him it’s doubtless he’s the final surviving former Alcatraz inmate.
President Trump introduced final week that he was directing the Bureau of Prisons and different federal companies to get the huge island facility off the San Francisco Bay again up and operating once more to lock away homegrown, repeat criminals.
Trump, 78, mentioned the “considerably enlarged and rebuilt” jail would “function a logo of Legislation, Order, and JUSTICE.”
Nevertheless, Hopkins — a Trump supporter — believes the commander-in-chief’s concept to revive a jail he calls “deader than the convicts it held” received’t work.
“It could be so costly,” he informed the BBC. “Again then, the sewage system went into the ocean. They’d need to give you one other approach of dealing with that.”
Hopkins believes Alcatraz is finest left up to now.
“You may’t return in time,” Hopkins mentioned. “That place belongs to the previous.”
