Inside the movie theatre of the Marquette Branch Prison, a December night in 1921 turned into the darkest chapter in the prison’s long history
On a December evening in 1921, inside the movie theatre of the Marquette Branch Prison, three convicts pulled out knives and attacked the two men who ran the place. By the time it was over, the prison’s warden and deputy warden were both fatally wounded. It remains the only time in Michigan history that a prison warden has been killed, and it happened on the shore of Lake Superior.
A prison on the edge of Lake Superior
The Marquette Branch Prison had opened in 1889 to hold some of the state’s most dangerous men in the far north of the U.P. Even today it is known partly for the flower gardens that bloom outside its walls, but its early decades were marked by hardship, escape attempts, and violence. By 1921, the prison was run by its sixth warden, Theodore Burr Catlin.
That year had already been a tense one. In the fall, a convict named Arthur Harper, known around the prison as “Gypsy Bob,” became the first man in seventeen years to escape, simply by going over the fence. Within days, two more inmates climbed out using a ladder they had built from scrap lumber. All three were captured and brought back, but the sense that the prison was slipping was hard to shake.
The attack in the theatre
On December 11, 1921, inmates were gathered in the prison’s movie theatre. Harper and two other convicts, Jasper Perry and Charles Roberts, were armed with knives they had managed to make or smuggle. Without warning, they turned on Warden Catlin, Deputy Warden Fred Menhennett, the deputy’s son, and a prison guard, stabbing them again and again. The theatre erupted in chaos. Remarkably, not a single other inmate joined the attack.
Warden Catlin, badly wounded, managed to pull himself into a side room and hold the door shut until guards could regain control and subdue the three attackers. But the cost was terrible. Deputy Warden Menhennett died there at the scene. Catlin, stabbed nine times, held on for six weeks before he died of his wounds at the end of January 1922.
Remembered for his courage
To this day, it stands as the only time in the history of Michigan’s prison system that both a warden and his deputy were killed. The men who died were not forgotten. After Catlin’s death, one prisoner described him simply as a man of intense courage, fair and just to everyone, who compromised on nothing.
The U.P.’s quiet communities have seen more than their share of dark events over the years, from that night in Marquette to the murder case that later inspired a Hollywood classic. But few chapters are as stark as this one.
More than a century later, the Marquette Branch Prison still stands above the cold water of Lake Superior, still holding some of the state’s most serious offenders, the same prison that, generations later, would make headlines again when a drug operation was uncovered running inside it. The flowers still bloom outside the old stone walls every summer. But folded into its long history is this dark December night, when a quiet evening at the movies became the most violent the U.P.’s great prison has ever known.
Sources: historical records of the Marquette Branch Prison, the Michigan Corrections Organization, and U.P. historian Ernest “Sonny” Longtine.
Featured image: Marquette Branch Prison in Marquette, Michigan, circa 1912. Image from Souvenir of Negaunee by William H. Israel, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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