It happened during a Sunday matinee in 1921 — the only time in Michigan history that inmates have ever killed a prison warden
Drive south out of Marquette along the lake and you’ll pass it: Marquette Branch Prison, a hulking sandstone fortress set behind manicured lawns and flower beds so tidy that people actually pull over to photograph them.
It opened in 1889. It still holds some of the most dangerous men in Michigan. And behind those walls, it has seen escapes, riots, and bloodshed.
But one Sunday afternoon in 1921, it became the scene of something that had never happened before in this state, and has never happened since.
Inmates killed the warden.
Marquette Branch Prison in 1911. Image: Alvah Littlefield Sawyer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The most dangerous man in Michigan
His name was Arthur Harper, though everyone knew him as “Gypsy Bob.” He was 42, with a criminal record stretching back three decades, and by reputation he was the single most dangerous inmate in the entire Michigan prison system. He’d been shipped up to Marquette from the prison downstate in Jackson in 1919, after he killed another inmate.
He was not a man who cared for rules.
So when a new warden named Theodore Catlin took over in 1921 and began rolling back the privileges Harper had been granted under the old administration, Harper took it personally.
He had already shown he could leave more or less whenever he wanted. That September, he simply hopped the prison fence and walked off, the first successful escape from Marquette in seventeen years. He was caught and brought back. But he wasn’t finished.
A knife in the dark of a Sunday movie
On the afternoon of Sunday, December 11, 1921, the inmates were gathered in the prison theater for a movie.
Harper and two other convicts, Jasper Perry and Charles Roberts, were waiting in the dark with homemade knives.
When the lights went down, they rushed Warden Catlin and stabbed him over and over. Deputy Warden Fred Menhennett threw himself into the attack trying to protect the warden, and was cut down beside him. The deputy’s own son and a prison guard were stabbed too, as the theater erupted into chaos.
Somehow, through all of it, not one other inmate joined in. Catlin, badly wounded, managed to drag himself into a side room and hold the door shut until guards stormed in and finally subdued the three attackers.
Deputy Warden Menhennett did not survive. Warden Catlin held on for six more weeks before he died of his wounds on January 30, 1922.
It was the first time in the history of Michigan’s prison system that inmates had killed the men running a prison. More than a century later, it is still the only time.
Here is the strangest part. In plenty of states, the men who did it would have been sentenced to hang.
Not in Michigan. The state had abolished the death penalty back in 1846, the first English-speaking government in the world to do it, so there was no gallows waiting. Instead, the attackers were flogged, dozens of lashes at a time, and sent back to their cells.
Even some of the inmates who watched it happen remembered Catlin as a fair man. Hard, but honest, and the same with everyone.
Marquette Branch Prison today
Marquette Branch Prison is still open, one of the highest-security lockups in the state, and it still lands in the news for violence behind its walls. It sits in the same U.P. that, a century later, gave us the prison drug ring federal prosecutors say stretched across eleven Michigan counties, and the contraband busts that still play out at U.P. prisons today. For a place the rest of the country pictures as nothing but quiet woods and big water, the U.P. has a long and surprising history with hard crime — it’s the same region, after all, where a real murder became one of the greatest courtroom films ever made.
But the strangest thing about the prison might still be the contrast. A maximum-security fortress, full of the men the rest of the system can’t handle, fronted by some of the prettiest flower gardens in the city.
People pull over to admire them every summer.
Most of them have no idea what happened on the other side of the wall.
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