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Sue sue

Take 6
There was a practice that had been in existence for a number of years of shutting the windows, turning off the water, turning up the heat, and that’s how they punished the men,” Hornblum said. But that weekend, with 98-degree temperatures outside, it was well over 100 degrees inside the Klondike, and hot steam was pouring in. “The inmates were crying, pleading, and screaming to open the windows.”
On Monday morning, guards opened the doors to find a number of the men unconscious. Four were dead.
“They came to their deaths by violence,” the coroner told The Inquirer that day.
“Nothing suspicious,” a homicide detective told a skeptical Inquirer reporter, who summed up the police theory of events as follows: “A battle to the death, which, by curious coincidence, took place between two couples of convicts who became temporarily insane.”




The dead were listed as:



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Henry Osborne, 23, serving three to 10 years for burglary and possession of burglar tools.
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James McQuade, 26, serving 18 months to three years for assault and battery on a policeman and threatening a detective.
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Frank Comodeco, 46, a former boxer, serving 10 to 20 years for robbery.
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Joseph John Walters, 57, a long-term prisoner who had been in jail, off and on, since 1913.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE EVIDENCE that the men had been burned or scalded? One city jurist, Judge Harry S. McDevitt, theorized that the men were scalded when they broke steam pipes in an attempt to procure weapons.



The police approached the coroner to make their respective reports appear similar.But there were no broken pipes or weapons of any kind in the possession of the inmates. In fact, the two dozen prisoners sent to the Klondike for their role in the hunger strike were stripped nearly naked and remained that way through the duration of the ordeal.

Two officials who suspected cover-up and determined to get to the bottom of it were Coroner Charles Hersch and Charles Engard, State Secretary of Welfare. Their investigation would be prompt, vigorous and impervious to official interference.


By Tuesday, August 23, it was revealed that the police had approached the coroner's office with an appeal that their respective reports be made to appear similar. In fact, they were diametrically opposite. The reports, according to the Philadelphia Record, read "like the versions of two opposing attorneys."

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IN THE MEANTIME, THE CITY'S NEWSPAPERSwere filled with stories on the deceased inmates' families, the history of the Klondike, the results of the autopsies, and a proposed "roasting test" that would have "human guinea pigs" endure time in the deadly punishment unit.



The newspaper drawings of the Klondike showed a small, narrow building between cellblocks D and E in the prison yard. A red brick structure with iron bars, the one story building contained twelve 9' x 5' cells with barely enough room for a toilet and faucet. Opposite and outside the cells, suspended against the walls, was a large bank of radiators fed from a supply line that ran along the ceiling. Both the radiators and pipes, as well as the building's few windows, were out of the inmates' reach.Inside the cells, the temperature approached 200 degrees — high enough for protein cells to




 
Meh

Criminals. Good fucking riddance to em.

Were too soft on shitstains nowadays. I hate all these subhumans.
 

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