Robert Stroud

Robert Stroud (born 1890, Seattle, Washington, U.S.—died November 21, 1963, Springfield, Missouri) was an American criminal, a convicted murderer who became a self-taught ornithologist during his 54 years in prison, 42 of them in solitary confinement, and made notable contributions to the study of birds.

At the age of 13 Stroud ran away from home, and by the age of 18 he was in Juneau, Alaska, working as a pimp and living with a dance-hall girl. An argument over the girl led to his fighting and killing a man. Pleading guilty to manslaughter on August 23, 1909, he was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound. After stabbing a fellow prisoner and proving generally troublesome, he was transferred to Leavenworth Prison, Kansas (1912), where he continued to be a loner but began to educate himself, taking university extension courses. On March 26, 1916, he stabbed and killed a guard and was tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang; but on April 15, 1920, President Woodrow Wilson commuted his sentence to life imprisonment in solitary confinement.

Thereafter, mostly in solitary confinement, he began raising canaries and other birds, collecting laboratory equipment, and studying the diseases of birds and their breeding and care. Some of his research writings were smuggled out of prison and published; his book, Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds, published in 1943, was an important work in the field. In 1942, however, Stroud was transferred to Alcatraz, where he was allowed to continue his research but was denied further right of publication. In 1959 he was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Springfield, Missouri, where he spent the last four years of his life.