Record
Finding aid
1935-10-26/1939-01-13
National Archives Catalog
Arthur Barker's Alcatraz inmate case file, No. 268 (National Archives catalog entry)
Catalog entry for the Alcatraz case file of register no. 268, about 300 pages, not digitized. The description gives receipt from Leavenworth on 26 October 1935 and "DEATH" as the destination on 13 January 1939.
- Date
- 1935-10-26/1939-01-13
- Kind
- finding-aid
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- NAID
- 117695687
- Rights
- A catalog description of a Bureau of Prisons inmate case file (Record Group 129), a United States government record, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The catalog marks the file unit use and access "Unrestricted"; the parent series (NAID 622809) is marked "Restricted - Possibly" for copyright (newspaper clippings) and privacy, so the contents of a file need a page-by-page check.
The catalog title is “BARKER, ARTHUR R. “DOC” - Alcatraz Number 268.” The file unit belongs to the series Comprehensive Case Files of Former Inmates Incarcerated at U.S. Penitentiary, Alcatraz, California, in the Records of the Bureau of Prisons at the National Archives at San Francisco. The catalog gives the size as “ca. 300 pp.” and lists no digitized pages, so the pages themselves have not been read for this archive; the page count is NARA’s estimate.
The catalog description gives these fields: offense “NATIONAL BANK ROBBERY & CONSPIRACY TO TRANSPORT KI[DNAPPED PERSON]” (truncated in the catalog); received at Alcatraz 10/26/1935 from Leavenworth; transferred 01/13/1939 “to DEATH”; birth date 06/04/1899; remarks “KILLED DURING ESCAPE ATTEMPT; BARKER-KARPIS GANG”; death place Alcatraz (USP). Those are the catalog’s entries, not readings of the file.
The Bureau of Prisons’ account of the escape attempt of 13 January 1939 is on its Alcatraz history page. The FBI’s first telephone report of that morning is in the Vault file.
