Category Archives: Jerry’s Riot

The stunning book about a legendary Montana prison riot.

The woeful Montana tale of mysterious boy killer Lee Smart, riot ringleader

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Photo shows riot ringleader Lee Smart

Lee Smart, a teenage murderer, was 19 years old when he joined with Jerry Myles in a violent takeover of Montana State Prison on April 16, 1959.

By Kevin S. Giles

(c) copyright Kevin S. Giles

(I derived the following material from my prison memoir, Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance. My investigation into Lee Smart included personal interviews with people who knew him and research of documents related to his crimes. Jerry’s Riot, written from interviews with dozens of eyewitnesses, remains the only authoritative and copyrighted source of information about the riot.)

Photo shows cover of the book 'Jerry's Riot: The True Story of Montana's 1959 Prison Disturbance'

Jerry’s Riot tells the story of the 1959 takeover of Montana State Prison by career criminal Jerry Myles and his 19-year-old boyfriend, Lee Smart.

Today’s criminal laws would prohibit sending a 16-year-old boy to prison where he mingled with adult men. Yet that very thing happened in 1956 in the strange case of murderer Lee Smart.

The teenager’s romantic interest in a hardened career criminal more than twice his age led to a deadly takeover of Montana State Prison in April 1959.

Smart, 19, and his co-conspirator Jerry Myles seized the prison for thirty-six hours. Myles, a recognized sociopath, wanted glory. Smart’s motive hinged on his mistaken belief that Myles would help him escape.

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‘Walking the wall’ meant seeing Montana’s prison from a tower guard’s point of view

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Photo shows state troopers at Montana State Prison

My dad, Murry Giles, is shown kneeling and steadying the ladder outside Tower 7 the night of April 16, 1959. Armed state troopers climbed atop the wall to discourage inmates from attempting to break out. Tower 7, known also as “the main gate,” had fortified doors at street level that led into the prison. New prisoners walked through those doors to a life in the bars. Photo/Old Montana Prison

By Kevin S. Giles

Do high places bother you? Would you walk on a narrow wall 22 feet above the sidewalk? A wall lacking a railing?

When I read my father’s Montana State Prison hiring papers from 1958, after he applied for a guard job, handwriting near the bottom caught my eye. “Walked the wall OK,” someone wrote.

BUY! Jerry's Riot

I didn’t fully grasp the significance of that notation until I began researching for my book, Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance, years later. The prison required applicants to “walk the wall” because tower guards rotated after an hour or two. Whether performing this feat was seen by administrators as a practical skill or a test of courage, I don’t know. The date on my dad’s application shows he walked the wall in winter. How did he avoid falling?

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Liquor company owner takes over shuttered Montana hotel, promises revival

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Photo of Hotel Deer Lodge.

Hotel Deer Lodge, standing at the center of the city’s business district, opened in 1912 as “one of the finest accommodations in Montana.” (Photos courtesy of Deer Lodge Preservation, Inc.)

By Kevin S. Giles

The chief executive officer of a Montana-based liquor company will lead a historic hotel revival with a plan to create a five-star destination.

Kip Kimerly, of Precious Vodka USA, Inc., took charge of Hotel Deer Lodge preservation in a deal struck Jan. 23, 2020.

The hotel remains owned by Deer Lodge Preservation, Inc., but the group will be represented by a new board of directors that Kimerly will lead as president, said Kayo Fraser, one of the former board members.

Kimerly envisions a nonprofit project to restore the empty building for hotel use on the upper floors, with retail space and a banquet room created on the ground floor.

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Reunions remind us of time and place, also restore valued face-to-face contact

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Photo shows class reunion

Kevin S. Giles with high school classmates (and longtime friends) Eric and Don at the July 2019 all-class reunion in Deer Lodge, Montana.

By Kevin S. Giles

Long before social media became a convenient tool for organizing reunions (or displacing them), people traveled great distances to enjoy face-to-face gatherings with friends and relatives.

Today reunions endure. We have reunions to celebrate music, religion, employment, ethnic heritage, history, neighborhoods, cities and military service.

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Inside story: when bold rioting convicts took control of Montana State Prison

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Prison mug shot of Jerry Myles

Jerry Myles was a stubby, intelligent career criminal who planned the April 16, 1959, takeover in defiance of new ‘reform’ Warden Floyd Powell. Photo by Kevin Giles

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By Kevin S. Giles

Sixty years ago, a deadly uprising at Montana State Prison began when two dangerous inmates doused a guard in Cell House 1 with gasoline and threatened to set him afire with a flaming mop. The inmates took the guard’s rifle and several rounds of ammunition and then, over the next few hours, gained control of the entire prison.

When inmates control the prison …

That riot began on Thursday, April 16, 1959. It ended 36 hours later.

Cover of 'Jerry's Riot'

This memoir by Kevin S. Giles details the 1959 disturbance at Montana State Prison and events leading to it.

Those troublesome inmates were Jerry Myles and Lee Smart, both psychopaths. Myles was the mastermind. He was a career burglar and an intelligent conniver. His ability to break rules and lead inmate mutinies resulted in his incarceration in three federal prisons, including Alcatraz. Smart was a runaway delinquent who, on impulse, became a teenage murderer. Guards who knew the men said they were lovers.

Smart shot and killed Deputy Warden Ted Rothe in his office inside the walls. Myles slashed a sergeant with a knife, seriously injuring him. They took 26 hostages, both guards and civilians, threatening to burn them alive or hang them from the cell house galleys. Minutes after the National Guard begin a barrage of rocket fire from the west wall of the prison yard, Myles shot Smart and then himself in the northwest corner of Cell House 1.

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My small town vs. all those big cities: Here’s one native Montanan’s point of view.

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Photo shows Japanese friends

When I attended a banquet in Japan, two of these young women came to me with a camera, gesturing they wanted their photo taken. Three more jumped into the picture seconds before it was taken. I think they liked that I am tall.

By Kevin S. Giles

I told someone the other day about visiting Tokyo-Yokohama, an imagination-stretching megalopolis of 38 million people. Riding a bus into the heart of Tokyo from Narita International Airport took three hours. It was after dark. Even in the night, young business types toting briefcases streamed down the sidewalks. That scene continued for most of my journey to a downtown hotel where I could extend my arms to reach both walls in my room. In a megalopolis, space is precious.

Raised a small-town Montanan, I never felt inclined to intentionally seek out big cities. I’ve seen my share, such as Chicago and Honolulu and Sydney. I’m probably a better man for it. A good life is one of resonance, particularly for writers. Fabled large cities bring perspective to our occupation of this good earth.

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Echoes and ghosts: Montana prison women left teardrops on the cell house floor

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Photo of female Montana prison inmate

One of the youngest women ever held at Montana State Prison was Evelyn Donges, then 16. She was convicted for luring a man into a robbery on September 11, 1951. He was beaten and later died.

(This story first appeared in the Sunday features section of the Helena, Mont., Independent Record. I wrote it after women held captive at Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge were moved elsewhere. In those days, the women’s unit held only few female offenders. Today, Montana has about 200 inmates in the women’s unit, now in Billings.)

By Kevin S. Giles

DEER LODGE, Mont. — It was a long time ago, it seems, when the women were here.

The row of empty cells – four of them – are dark and damp.

One is empty. Its mattress is rolled and stacked at one end of the bunk, which is cyclone fencing stretched across a metal frame.

In another, books of salvation are scattered across the bed. The gleam of a faraway window bounces off one cover, illuminating its title: Prison to Praise.

A third is the home of a ghost. The bedding has been thrown aside, as if the cell’s occupant was startled by the cold metallic clank of a cell door, and stood for a smoke, or awakened by a nightmare of the past.

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Interview with Montana native Kevin S. Giles who writes books about his home state

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Photo shows Kevin S. Giles

Kevin S. Giles is a native Montanan and longtime newspaper journalist.

You’ve published a biography of Jeannette Rankin. Who was she?

¶ History knows her as the first woman elected to Congress. She went to the US House of Representatives in 1916. She was a fierce suffragist, led Montana to approving suffrage in 1914, and rode that momentum to Congress. At that time only 10 states had given women the right to vote. Once Montanans elected Rankin, national suffragists saw her as the voice in Congress who would achieve a federal suffrage amendment.

Did that work out?

¶ Unfortunately for the suffragists, no. World War I got in the way. But even as Congress preoccupied itself with war legislation, Rankin led a push for the federal amendment. The House approved it but the Senate didn’t, by a narrow margin, and it wasn’t until the next Congress that the amendment got enough votes and went to the states for ratification. Some people fault Rankin for failing to secure suffrage by federal amendment in those two years she served in the House. I think the opposite.There’s substantial proof that Rankin’s success at being elected astonished many Americans, the first woman ever, and she achieved more in that term than anybody expected. During that war, Congress didn’t spend much time considering the needs of women and children. That was Rankin’s principal platform, so you can see her challenges beyond the obvious one of being the only woman in the entire male Congress.

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Tales of Froggy, Turkey Pete and ghosts of other old Montana prison convicts

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By Kevin S. Giles

We squinted at the wind-chapped brick, trying to decipher some of the nicknames carved into it.

“Right there!” said the old guard, jabbing impatiently with his finger, and I knew he was waiting to tell me a story. “That one!”

He pushed me closer to the wall, pointing again to a crude carving. I saw it, sure enough. “Froggy,” it read, but I didn’t know the name and when I shrugged, he seemed grateful for my ignorance.

The old guard tore into a checkered tale, staining the air with his blue language. The story he told described a convict who had spent a half-century at the Old Montana Prison in Deer Lodge, Montana. He had been an accomplice in a sensational 1959 riot. It was a blood-letting; three people died.

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Cement shoes? In a Montana prison riot? It’s fantasy made for television

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Photo shows cement shoes

Cement shoes, on display at Old Montana Prison, made a prop for a Travel Channel video, but there’s no evidence they had anything to do with inmate Jerry Myles and the 1959 riot.

By Kevin S. Giles

A friend called me recently to ask if I had seen a Travel Channel feature about the 1959 riot at Montana State Prison that aired that night.

“Tell me it’s not the urban myth about Jerry Myles and the cement shoes,” I interrupted.

Sure enough, that was the one, contrived and cartoonish straight through to its overwrought (but merciful) ending 3:31 minutes later. This Mysteries in the Museum stinker surely provided entertainment value to some viewers. Who wouldn’t marvel at watching an angry convict start a prison disturbance because guards made him wear shoes with heavy cement soles?

Quite a story – but not true.

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