Memorandum for the Director (Tamm), 13 January 1939: five prisoners missing from Alcatraz are located on the island (FBI Vault)
An FBI memorandum of 8:00 a.m. on 13 January 1939 reporting a call from Mr. Pieper that five prisoners missing from Alcatraz were found on the beach; a 9:15 addendum names Arthur Barker among them and says he and one other were wounded.
- Date
- 1939-01-13
- Kind
- case-file
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- A record of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released under FOIA and served by the FBI Vault. A work of the United States government, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. Redactions on the page are the FBI's.
Page 3 of the Vault file “Arthur R. ‘Doc’ Barker,” Part 01 (123 pages), as the viewer numbers it. It is a memorandum for the Director, John Edgar Hoover, from E. A. Tamm, dated January 13, 1939, “Time - 8:00 A.M.” Tamm reports that Mr. Pieper called “to advise that the five prisoners who are missing from Alcatraz have been located on the beach on the island,” and that “they did not escape from the Island.” Pieper had been told that two of the men were dead, two wounded and one apparently all right.
An addendum for 9:15 A.M. says the five were all in custody and had been replaced in the cell block, and names the men as Arthur Barker, Dale Stamphill, Rufus McCain, Henry Young and William Martin, with Barker and Stamphill wounded. Tamm records that he told Pieper to open an investigation only if full information was furnished, and not if the prison authorities meant “to compete with us.” The page carries the stamp “76-4175-1, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Jan 17 1939.” The early report of two dead was corrected within the hour; the Bureau of Prisons and the National Archives record that only Barker died, later that day (BOP; warden’s notebook page).
