Alcatraz_ A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years - Michael Esslinger [228]
All I can say in conclusion was Daryl was high-strung, quick-tempered, and very nervous. At age 6 he developed a stammer. It was not bad, but irritated him a lot. He changed schools three times by our moving, and he resented the last school bringing home all F’s in every department. He has been in the Boys Industrial School, Mansfield Reformatory, Lorton and the prison in Maryland. He came nearer adjusting himself after leaving Mansfield, staying out of trouble three years. He returned from Lorton Prison in very bad shape having made friends with an elder criminal, which he ended where he is now, with you. Each time Daryl has been in trouble we hope and pray it will be his last. That hasn’t happened yet and we hope that he will come out of your prison a better boy for our faith in prisons is very low at the moment.
The inmate is married but has no children. He married Margaret Davis January 19, 1952, at Canton, Ohio, and stated there had been no discord with his wife, who is self supporting as a secretary, and he stated that in view of his long sentence, he had advised her to obtain a divorce.
By 1957 Daryl’s criminal record was already full of entries, ranging from juvenile stints as a runaway beginning in 1944, to armed robbery charges in 1957. A bank robbery that he committed in that year with his friend John Bartholomew is detailed in his criminal summary:
Attached to the form 792, U.S. Attorney’s Report, accounting for the sentence of 20 years on count 1 and 25 years concurrently on count 2 for Bank Robbery and assault with a deadly weapon was the statement, Defendant, Daryl Lee Parker, which John T. Bartholomew, robbed the Clinton and Rudisill Branch of the Lincoln National Bank and Trust Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana of the sum of $50,104.00 on Friday, October 18, 1957.
The men became acquainted while both were doing time in the Federal Reformatory at Lorton, Virginia. Daryl Lee Parker, though the younger of the two men, carefully laid all of the plans and made all of the arrangements for the bank robbery. He furnished the weapons used and stole two automobiles used as getaway cars. Both Parker and Bartholomew wore grotesque Halloween masks during the actual robbery. The defendant Daryl Lee Parker disguised his appearance by the use of black hair dye and of suntan theatrical grease paint. Both men entered the bank together. Bartholomew carried a .45 automatic pistol, while Daryl Lee Parker carried a .357 caliber magnum revolver, which, we are informed, is the most powerful handgun made, so powerful that it will drive a shell through the motor block of an automobile engine.
Bartholomew took up a position near the front of the of the bank, menacing the branch manager and the assistant branch manager with his gun, and directing them to fill a laundry bag with the bank’s money from the teller’s cages. Daryl Lee Parker proceeded to the rear of the bank menacing tellers behind the teller’s cages with his magnum revolver, and compelling a youthful vault casher to take money from the drive-in windows of the bank and put it in one of the bank’s money bags. During the time of the robbery there were 15 to 20 customers in the bank. Daryl Lee Parker vaulted over the gate in the area behind the teller’s cages, held the magnum revolver to a young girl cashier and on the youthful vault cashier whom he ordered not to take another step or he would “blow your head off.” Daryl Lee Parker ordered all of the clerks away from their teller’s cages and said that if the police should come during the robbery he and his fellow robber would take 3 hostages and that they would kill the hostages without hesitation.
Defendant Daryl Lee Parker planned this bank robbery with such meticulous attention to detail that it required months of intensive investigation to assemble the evidence required