The Birdman of Alcatraz: The Real Story of Robert Stroud
Updated: Oct 28
In 1962, cinema audiences around the world watched Burt Lancaster play a gentle, softly spoken prisoner who turned his tiny cell into an aviary, nursed sick birds back to health and became a world expert in their diseases. The film was called Birdman of Alcatraz, and it made the real man behind it one of the most famous prisoners in America.
There were a few problems with that picture. The real Robert Stroud never kept a single bird on Alcatraz. He'd been sent to prison for killing a man, then killed again behind bars, stabbing a guard to death in front of more than a thousand prisoners. Many of the people who knew him didn't remember a kindly old bird lover. They remembered someone cold, clever and dangerous.
And yet the bird part was true. Locked in solitary confinement for decades, Stroud taught himself enough science to become a genuine expert on bird diseases, wrote books that bird breeders still talk about, and ran a business from his cell. His story is stranger, darker and more interesting than the Hollywood version.
Quick Answers
Who was the Birdman of Alcatraz? Robert Stroud, a convicted murderer who spent 54 years in federal prisons and became a respected expert on bird diseases while in solitary confinement.
Did he keep birds at Alcatraz? No. All of his bird research took place at Leavenworth in Kansas. When he was moved to Alcatraz in 1942 he wasn't allowed to keep a single bird.
Who did he kill? A bartender called Charlie von Dahmer in Juneau, Alaska, in 1909, and a Leavenworth prison guard named Andrew Turner in 1916.
How long was he in solitary confinement? About 42 of his 54 years in prison were spent in segregation or solitary confinement.
When did he die? On 21 November 1963, aged 73, at the federal prison medical centre in Springfield, Missouri, the day before President Kennedy was assassinated.
A Violent Childhood
Robert Franklin Stroud was born in Seattle on 28 January 1890. His home life was miserable. His father drank heavily and was violent, and young Robert was often ill and barely went to school. He later said he'd tried to protect his younger brother and half-sisters from the beatings.
When he was 13, the family fell apart and he left home. For the next few years he drifted around the Pacific Northwest, picking up work where he could. In 1908, aged 18, after another violent row with his father, he headed north to Alaska, where there was money to be made on the railroads and in the boomtowns.
The First Killing
In the town of Cordova, Stroud met Kitty O'Brien, a dance-hall entertainer who also worked as a prostitute. She was 36. He was 18. They became a couple, and Stroud lived off her earnings, effectively acting as her pimp. The two of them moved to Juneau.
On 18 January 1909, a bartender named F. K. Von Dahmer, known as Charlie, beat Kitty up and, according to Stroud, refused to pay her. Stroud went looking for him. There was a fight, and Stroud shot him dead. Some accounts say he knocked Von Dahmer unconscious first, then shot him.
Stroud turned himself in and was charged with first-degree murder. Alaska was a US territory at the time, so the case was heard in a federal court. In the end, a plea of manslaughter was accepted, and on 23 August 1909 he was sentenced to 12 years in the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island, in Puget Sound, Washington.
A Dangerous Prisoner
Stroud was a terrible prisoner. At McNeil Island he stabbed another inmate who'd reported him for stealing food, and attacked a hospital orderly. Each incident added to his sentence and wrecked any chance of early release. In September 1912 he was transferred to the much tougher federal penitentiary at Leavenworth in Kansas, a prison that would later become famous for the Will West fingerprint case.
On 26 March 1916, things came to a head in the Leavenworth dining hall. A guard named Andrew Turner had put Stroud on report for a minor breach of the rules, which meant he would lose his visiting privileges and miss a visit from his younger brother, who'd travelled a long way to see him. Stroud was furious. In the middle of lunch, with more than a thousand prisoners watching, he walked up to Turner and stabbed him in the heart with a knife he'd made himself. Turner died almost at once.
Sentenced to Hang
Stroud was tried for murder and sentenced to death. Then the conviction was thrown out on a legal technicality and he was tried again, and then again. His case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which in November 1919 ruled in Stroud v. United States that retrying him and sentencing him to death again didn't break the rule against being tried twice for the same crime. He was sentenced to hang in 1920.
His mother, Elizabeth, never stopped fighting for him. She wrote to President Woodrow Wilson and, crucially, to his wife, Edith. Wilson had suffered a severe stroke in 1919, and Edith was effectively controlling what reached him. In April 1920, just days before the execution was due, Stroud's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
The prison authorities were not happy. They believed Stroud was a killer who should have hanged, and the warden made sure he would serve his sentence in isolation. Stroud would spend most of the rest of his life in solitary confinement.
Three Sparrows
Then something unexpected happened. Around 1920, while he was out in the exercise yard, Stroud found a nest with three baby sparrows that had fallen out of a tree during a storm. He took them back to his cell and nursed them. They survived.
It changed his life. Stroud became fascinated by birds, and he asked if he could keep canaries. Prisoners were sometimes allowed pets, and the authorities agreed. Before long he was breeding them.
A new warden at Leavenworth saw the publicity value in a murderer reformed by birds, and gave Stroud more freedom than any prisoner had ever had. He was allowed cages, scientific equipment, chemicals and books. Eventually he was given a second cell next to his own to use as a laboratory. At one point he had around 300 canaries.
The Bird Doctor
Stroud had almost no formal education, but he taught himself chemistry, anatomy and the science of bird diseases. He studied his birds obsessively, carried out experiments, and dissected the ones that died. He was especially interested in a disease called haemorrhagic septicaemia, which could wipe out whole flocks of canaries, and he developed treatments for it.
He began writing for bird-breeding magazines like the Roller Canary Journal, and breeders all over America started writing to him for advice. He sold his own remedies through the post, and with the help of supporters outside, he turned it into a real business.
In 1933 his first book, Diseases of Canaries, was published. Parts of it had been smuggled out of the prison. It was followed in 1943 by Stroud's Digest on the Diseases of Birds, a much bigger book that was taken seriously by vets and breeders. Some of his observations were genuinely ahead of their time.
Running a business from prison created headaches for the authorities. Every letter Stroud sent or received had to be checked, and there were so many that the prison needed a member of staff just to deal with his mail. His cells, full of birds flying around, seed, droppings and chemicals, were a hygiene nightmare. In 1931, when officials tried to shut the operation down, his supporters launched a campaign and sent a petition with tens of thousands of signatures to President Herbert Hoover. Stroud kept his birds.
The Marriage
One of the people who wrote to Stroud was Della Mae Jones, a bird breeder from Indiana. She was so impressed by him that she moved to Kansas to help run his bird business on the outside.
By the 1930s, prison officials were keen to move Stroud somewhere he'd be less trouble. Stroud found out about a Kansas law that he believed would make it harder to transfer a married prisoner out of the state. So he and Della Mae Jones married by proxy, and then made it public.
It was a stunt, and it backfired. The prison authorities were furious, and so was his mother, who had fought so hard to save his life. She turned against him, and the two were never reconciled. Stroud also fell out with his publishers, accusing them of cheating him out of his royalties.
Off to the Rock
The authorities finally got their chance in 1942. Officials discovered that Stroud had been using some of his laboratory equipment to build a still and make alcohol. That was enough. He was given very little notice before being taken away, and he wasn't allowed to bring his birds or his equipment.
On 19 December 1942, Robert Stroud arrived at Alcatraz, the federal prison on an island in San Francisco Bay that held some of the most dangerous men in America, including, a few years earlier, Al Capone. He became inmate number 594.
This is where the film gets it most wrong. Stroud never kept birds on Alcatraz. Not one. He spent his first six years there in segregation in D Block, the isolation unit, and then around 11 years in the prison hospital, where he was kept away from other inmates.
Life on the Rock
Alcatraz was designed to be the end of the line. It took the men other federal prisons couldn't handle, and it ran on a strict routine. Each prisoner had his own tiny cell, about five feet by nine, with a bed, a sink and a toilet. In the prison's early years, prisoners weren't even allowed to talk to each other for much of the day.
The isolation cells in D Block were worse. Some of them, known as the hole, were completely dark. Even in the ordinary cells, the hardest part for many prisoners was being able to see and hear San Francisco across the water. On quiet nights the sound of parties and music would drift over from the city, especially on New Year's Eve, a constant reminder of everything they were missing.
For Stroud, who'd spent two decades surrounded by his birds, books and chemicals, it was a brutal change. Everything that had given his life shape at Leavenworth was gone. He was in his fifties, his health was getting worse, and he had little left but his own mind.
The Battle of Alcatraz
In May 1946, six prisoners on Alcatraz tried to break out. They overpowered guards, got hold of guns and took hostages, but couldn't get out of the cellhouse. The siege lasted two days. The authorities called in the Marines, who dropped grenades through holes in the roof. Two guards and three of the escapers were killed.
Stroud's role in the battle depends on who you believe. According to the version popularised by his biographer Thomas Gaddis, Stroud climbed down from his tier and shut the steel doors of the cells in D Block to protect the prisoners from the gunfire, and shouted to the guards that innocent men would be killed. Other accounts say he took no part at all, and later accused the prison authorities of trying to kill him by bombarding D Block.
The Writer
Without his birds, Stroud turned to writing. He studied law and filed petitions to try to get his convictions overturned. He wrote a long history of the American prison system, Looking Outward, and an autobiography. The prison authorities banned both from being published.
Prison psychiatrists diagnosed him as a psychopath. Officials who dealt with him described him as intelligent but manipulative, and some saw his bird work as a way of getting attention and privileges rather than proof that he'd changed.
Birdman of Alcatraz
In the early 1950s, a former probation officer named Thomas Gaddis became interested in Stroud's story. He wrote about him in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1953, and in 1955 published a book, Birdman of Alcatraz, which painted Stroud as a brilliant, misunderstood man brutalised by the prison system. Gaddis campaigned for his release.
In 1962 the book was turned into a film, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Burt Lancaster, whose own company produced it. Lancaster was nominated for an Oscar, and so was Telly Savalas, who played a fellow prisoner. The film showed Stroud keeping birds on Alcatraz, which never happened, and portrayed him as gentle and humane, which many who'd met him found hard to recognise.
Lancaster threw himself into the part, and the film's portrait of Stroud as a quiet, dignified scholar was hugely persuasive. Audiences came out of cinemas convinced that a gentle old man was being kept in prison for no good reason. Letters poured in to the authorities, and Lancaster himself publicly backed the idea that Stroud deserved to be freed. The authorities, who still regarded Stroud as a double killer with a long record of violence, didn't agree.
Stroud himself was never allowed to see it. The film did, however, lead to a new wave of calls for his release. One cynical fellow inmate summed it up by saying that people didn't want to pardon Robert Stroud, they wanted to pardon Burt Lancaster.
The End
In 1959, with his health failing, Stroud was moved from Alcatraz to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. He was never released.
Robert Stroud died in his sleep at Springfield on 21 November 1963, aged 73. He had spent 54 years in prison, around 42 of them in solitary confinement. His body was found by another prisoner, Morton Sobell, who had been jailed for his part in the Rosenberg spy ring. The news of his death was quickly overshadowed. The next day, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
Alcatraz itself had closed earlier that year. A few years later, in 1969, it was occupied by Native American activists, and today it's one of San Francisco's biggest tourist attractions. Visitors still ask to see the Birdman's cell.
Who Was the Real Birdman?
Robert Stroud was two things at once. He was a man who killed twice, who manipulated people, and who many officials believed was dangerous to the very end. He was also a man who, locked in a cell with almost nothing, taught himself a science from scratch and made a real contribution to it. His books helped bird keepers and vets for years.
Hollywood picked the version that made the better story. Like Henri Charrière's Papillon, the Birdman of Alcatraz became a legend that only loosely matched the man. The truth is less comfortable, but it's a lot more interesting.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into the story of Robert Stroud? These are worth a look.
Birdman of Alcatraz by Thomas E. Gaddis. The 1955 book that made Stroud famous and inspired the film. Read it knowing it's very much on his side.
Stroud's Digest on the Diseases of Birds by Robert Stroud. His own book on bird diseases, written in prison, for anyone curious about the work that made his name.
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