A prison curiosity

Richard Honeck (1877-after 1963), an American murderer, served what is believed to be the longest gaol sentence ever to terminate in a prisoner's release. Jailed in 1899 for the killing of a former school friend, Honeck was paroled from Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois on 20 December 1963, having served 64 years and one month of his life sentence. In the decades between his conviction and the time his case came to public notice again in August 1963, he received only a single letter – a four-line note from his brother in 1904 – and two visitors: a friend in 1904, and a newspaper reporter in 1963.

My recent stumble across mention of this oddity in Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky's incomparable The People's Almanac (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p.1341, inspired a brief flurry of research in the online archives of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune - the magnificent repositories of which are now fully keyword searchable from their first issues to the present day. A quarter of an hour's work was enough to flesh out a story easily bizarre enough to make the pages of FT – a good example of just how quickly researchers can move in this digital age.

Honeck, a telegraph operator and son of a wealthy dealer in farm equipment, was 22 years old when he was arrested in Chicago in September 1899 for the killing of Walter F. Koeller. He and another man, Herman Hundhausen, had gone to Koeller's room armed with an eight-inch bowie knife, a sixteen-inch bowie knife, a silver-plated case knife, a .44 caliber revolver, a .38 caliber revolver, a .22 caliber revolver, a club, and two belts of cartridges. They also carried two satchels filled with dime novels, obscene etchings, and clothes from which the names had been cut (New York Times, 4+5 September 1899).

Koeller, who was later found by the police sitting in a chair stabbed in the back, had testified for the prosecution some years earlier when Honeck and Hundhausen were charged with setting a number of fires in their home town, Hermann, Missouri (New York Times, 5 September 1899). According to a confession made by Hundhausen, the two men had sworn revenge and had planned Koeller's murder in considerable detail. Honeck, Hundhausen said, had stabbed the dead man with the eight inch bowie knife (Ibid and Chicago Tribune, 5 September, 22+25 October, 5 November 1899).

It was left to a latter-day Associated Press reporter, the memorably-named Bob Poos, to shine a spotlight on Honeck’s case in 1963 after seeing reference to it in the Menard prison newspaper. Poos noted that after his initial article was published in the paper, the aged murderer received a mailbag of 2,000 letters, including a proposal of marriage from a woman in Germany, offers of employment, and gifts of money in sums ranging from $5 down to 25 cents. Honeck, who was permitted under prison rules to answer one letter per week, observed: "It'll take a long time to deal with these." (Chicago Tribune, 25 August and 27 October 1963)

Honeck spent the first years of his sentence in Joliet Prison, where in 1912 he stabbed the assistant warden with a hand-crafted knife. He served 28 days in solitary confinement for that infraction, but had a clean record after moving to Menard, where he worked for 35 years in the prison bakery. "I guess I'd have to be pretty careful if I got paroled," the old lag concluded when interviewed by Poos. "There must be an awful lot of traffic now, and people, compared with what I remember." (Chicago Tribune, 25 August 1963).

The New York Times and Chicago Tribune are two of nearly a dozen major American newspapers whose full or partial archives are now available online – others include the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution, Washington Post, Daily Oklahoman, Dallas Morning News, and Boston Globe. All these archives are made available via pay sites, understandably enough given the considerable cost of digitisation, and typically give a brief preview of their articles, in the form of a headline, wordcount and the first 50 or so words of the piece in question. Pricing for individual articles can be relatively steep – usually $3.95 a pop - but be aware that much better deals are available. Most papers offer packages of 10, 25 or 50 articles, and these lower the unit cost considerably. It’s also well worth knowing that, while the majority of the titles mentioned above are sold only via a sometimes fiddly paysite operated by a company called ProQuest, the New York Times archive, which is the most valuable of all, is available at a far lower cost to subscribers to the online edition of the newspaper. Purchasing a monthly sub from the NYT’s own website entitles subscribers to download up to 100 articles a month from the archive at no extra cost, which - since the subscription cost is $7.95 - means the cost per clipping drops to a mere 8 cents, a vast saving on the Pro Quest price.