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Young’s mental condition continued to deteriorate. In June of 1948 he was admitted to the hospital, where “he postured, stared, and didn’t talk to personnel, but talked with other inmates.” Although his condition was considered suspect, Warden Swope finally received orders to transfer Young to the Springfield Medical Facility for the duration of his prison term, and he was sent there on September 13, 1948. The staff at Springfield conducted exhaustive examinations, but they were unable to render an accurate diagnosis or to determine whether he was feigning his illness. Throughout his stay at Springfield Young was considered a model inmate, and he seemed to adjust well to his new environment.

When Young’s Federal sentence expired in 1954, he was turned over to the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla to begin a life sentence for an earlier murder conviction. A special progress report dated September 2, 1954 indicates that Young was already planning for his release and intended to work for a trucking company in Kansas as a shipping clerk. Young was finally paroled in 1972. He subsequently violated his parole by failing to report his status and despite comprehensive searches, Henri Young disappeared and was never to be seen again. Young’s attorney James MacInnis, along with his wife would die tragically in a fatal car accident in 1979.

Henri Young in 1954.

One of the last known images of Young taken in November of 1970.

The Hollywood Version

Hollywood Actors Kevin Bacon (Young) and Christen Slater (Young’s attorney), in a fictionalized version of Young’s trial portrayed in the Warner Brothers motion picture Murder in the First.

Fifty years after Young’s trial, Warner Brothers Motion Pictures released a powerful drama that claimed to chart the true story of Henri Young, and was entitled Murder in the First. The film would succeed in making Young a legend, but it would not present an accurate portrayal of his life and crimes. The film itself was a great dramatic achievement for the filmmakers, but the script written by Dan Gordon was almost wholly fictional. Henri Young’s own autobiographical writings, in which he describes his adolescence and his descent into a life of delinquency, fully contradict the movie’s portrayal of him as a teenaged orphan sentenced to Alcatraz for stealing $5 from a grocery store in order to feed his starving sister.

The film featured some of the industry’s most prominent filmmakers and actors. The executive producer was David L. Wolper, who had previously produced such films as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the first documentary ever nominated for an Academy Award, The Race for Space. Director Marc Rocco was a young visionary who successfully captured the depth and darkness of the prison. Seasoned actor Kevin Bacon starred as Henri Young in a chilling portrayal, and Christian Slater played his principled and idealistic young attorney. The film also featured actor Gary Oldman in the role of the Warden of Alcatraz.

Shooting for the film began in 1994. During the thirteen-week shooting schedule, the production team for Murder in the First spent more than two weeks on Alcatraz to complete the interior and exterior shots. The logistics of filming on location at Alcatraz also proved challenging for Rocco and his crew. The whole company had to be brought over on boats and barges and the actors’ dressing rooms were the actual hospital ward cells once occupied by inmates. Using photographs from the penitentiary era as a reference, crews repainted sections of the cellblock to resemble its original state. The cinematographer’s visual plan was to create a design in which images would emerge from a stark and desolate landscape. The Alcatraz dungeons were re-constructed for the film on soundstages in Los Angeles, as were the courtroom sets.

Filming around the public tours that were regularly scheduled on the island also proved challenging to the filmmakers. Sometimes they were forced to film scenes with hundreds