"Quickest Way Out"

A year ago next week, the blackened bodies of 322 prisoners lay on the lawn of the Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus. They had been asphyxiated or roasted to death in the nation's most grisly prison holocaust (TIME, April 28). A hundred feet away from the lawn is the institution's death house, where felons are mortally burned in another fashion. To this dread place, last week, two inmates serving long terms for robbery begged to be sent speedily. These two convicts were known as Clinton ("Cotton") Grate and Hugh Gibbons. They confessed to firing the prison in the hope of effecting a wholesale delivery.

A third convict, James Raymond, made a similar confession to Warden Preston E. Thomas shortly after the rioting which followed last spring's conflagration. Harrowed by remorse, he asked to be placed in solitary confinement. There he hanged himself with his blanket that night. Another prisoner was placed in the same cell and warned that the dead face of the suicide would stare down on him. Next morning this man, James Maloney, admitted having supplied candles to start the blaze, denied knowing what they were to be used for. He will be indicted after the State of Ohio has dealt with Prisoners Grate and Gibbons.

Suspected and separated since the fire during which both did rescue work, Prisoners Grate and Gibbons incriminated themselves by a note intercepted between them. Their first attempt at incendiarism, they confessed, was made with a crude kerosene fire bomb in December 1929. It failed. Twice again the plotters tried unsuccessfully to burn the wooden forms surrounding the concrete beams of a cell-block under construction. Fourth and successful attempt was made by filling a gravy bowl with oil and shavings, using two candles for a fuse.

Agreeing to plead guilty if the prosecutor would promise him and Grate a quick execution, Prisoner Gibbons declared: "We want the quickest way out of this thing. The thing's been on my mind ever since the fire. We don't want to go back to the penitentiary. We've been there for nine years and know what it's like. It's not the prisoners but the officials we are afraid of. That's why we don't want to get a life sentence."

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