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After Roger had spelt the word pigs out of jelly beans, the prison guards had deemed him too menacing to be trusted with candy, so they confiscated the beans, which we can all agree is very pig like behavior, leaving Roger with a spirit full of four letter words, but with no tools with which to express them. He was left in a cell with a new epiphany pulsing in his head, a discovery about himself that he had something to say. Before this, it had never really crossed his mind to
put anything to paper. But when he would arrange these words made out of jelly beans, look at the colorful, simple, slanderous words, and think I made this word, and he could see a new world of possibility.
I felt I never finished Grade.
Sixth Writing a word or a sentence is something most of us take for granted, but for Roger it was a revelation. So down in solitary confinement, he thought, if I learned to write the characters of the words that I think or speak, I'm free to make whatever words I want. Being free in any way was very attractive to Roger. He couldn't go anywhere, or do anything, or eat what he wanted or see anyone he wanted. But if he could write, he could write anything he wished.
But how and with what. It was then that he remembered the Kingston Penitentiary had a school teacher based in the library, so he sent out a verbal quest for pencils and paper. His request made it all the way to the teacher, and that same day this teacher made the trip all the way down to the hole to deliver the supplies to Roger himself.
He get you three striggers, three pencil a dictionary, and ASSAURIUSM.
Roger was hardly allowed anything in the hole, so when he was handed these novel objects and allowed these objects, he almost couldn't believe it. So he figured might as well get started before they changed their mind. Roger had read books in the past, but when it came to his own writing, it was almost as if he was inventing it for himself, because what he was saying was more urgent than the logistics of spelling and punctuation. He had feelings that he needed to let out, and then I grant.
Out a pencil and had so much house failed. The intention to meet a pencil rob not easy. I opened a sprigger, I went to write the paper, tore the nip girl. I sharpened the dip of the confeefore, and then turned on the patient. I went to write, and it was like frustration.
I was choked up. All these massive words don't come out. They didn't know I was filled.
He'd spell phonetically or in a made up way for himself to decipher. Later, as he tried to keep up with a stream of consciousness, which was flowing like a river, he'd write about the past, about the scenes and people he'd encountered, the moments in his life that he'd revisit the most in his imagination. He was driven by the need to get these stories out of his head and into the physical realm in whatever way he could, at whatever pace it took.
So I stole in the dictionary and Sidorus, and I found words, and I started writing.
And it take me six hours to fill one felt paid.
He'd spend hours with the dictionary to see if he could find the words he meant and learn how to spell them correctly. Then he'd flip to the thesaurus and find better words, tune tunnels, catacombs. The limbo room was in the catacombs underneath the reformatory. There's such pleasure in finding the right words. Each addition to the vocabulary brought with it a new permission to feel.
But for the first time my life had felt good.
All these words are born of my own aurus to the word anger and fell definition.
Anger an intense emotional state of displeasure. See also indignation, rage, bitterness, higher contempt. Whole months would pass where it seemed like his pencil never stopped.
Moving, I wrote, wrote.
As the words plotted their way onto the page. He felt like he could unburden himself, one word at a time, of this mountain of strife and trauma.
And I really think that was the beginning of where he learned, Wow, write a few things down here and whatnot. And I think that's really what set him off onto his writing journey.
Around this time, Roger's sister Sue started to receive letters more regularly from her dear brother, where he'd explain this new writing kick he'd been on in the most Roger way possible.
He said, my fingers are cramping and just writing and writing and writing and writing. You know, I'm doing a lot of writing whatnot. And I said, super, you know this is good. This is good.
Sue had always been very encouraging of her brother through everything, and this was no different.
I thought, it's not going to do him any harm, and hopefully you'll learn from some of what he's putting down. Sometimes when we have to face our thoughts, it's better for us and we see it more. It's nothing like putting it on paper and having a good look at it.
When she received handwritten letters from Roger, she'd slide it from the envelope and would study the page fascinated.
It was just so interesting. He was writing as it sounded, you know, the spelling some of it. You had to almost figure it out.
With each letter. It became more obvious that writing was no passing fad in Roger's life. He was a writer.
He was just like a train down the track. He was just on a roll. So I guess he had a lot to say.
From iHeart podcasts and campsite media. I'm Sam Mullens and this is Go Boy episode five under new management. So the jellybeans were given to Roger on Christmas nineteen sixty three, and we need to fast forward to nineteen seventy one, eight years later. Usually when you're writing a podcast about someone, this is a good example of the type of time jump where you just skip those eight years, nice and clean.
But this is the story of Go Boy, where too much happens all the time, so we'll skim jellybeans were in sixty three, he starts writing. After twenty three months in the hole. He sent to Manitoba, then to Quebec, where he was finally paroled. He got a job laying brick, but then he was arrested for conspiring to rob a brinkstruck, which is how in late nineteen seventy he found himself for the first time in many years, entering through the
gates of the Kingston penn back where he started. Okay, so that gets us from sixty three to seventy one.
But the most important thing for our story is that throughout these seven plus years, while Nixon was being elected and the Beatles were making Sergeant Pepper's and Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon, Roger was writing and revising and rewriting, and his pages would always come with him from place to place, and by nineteen seventy one he do a lot of writing, not in his cell but in the KP library, where he was finally bold enough to share his work with someone other than his sister.
I went to work in the library there, Kitty, with all of my scrippers and the library and encourage to be the writing book.
Roger had been sharing some of the sections of his manuscript with the librarian and he told Roger that he thought he really had something here.
And then that's when he started talking, I probably got enough material here for a book, And I say why not? Why not? And he was really excited about telling me about that.
In the letters, Roger's manuscript had ballooned to eighteen hundred pages, and those pages had become the center of his whole life. He'd spent so many years looking over his shoulder, being hyper vigilant about his surroundings just to survive. But when he started thinking about a book, all the preoccupations of the institution kind of faded into the background. The project of his book was all encompassing, and there's almost no room anymore for the day to day dramas of the prison.
But whether he was paying attention or not, there was something in the air at the Kingston Penitentiary in nineteen seventy one. A pressure was building in the institution and things were about to explode. The prisoners had learned of a new super maximum security prison that was being built eighteen miles away, called Millhaven, or ironically the Haven for short,
and it was almost ready to open. The Kingston pen was nearly a century and a half old by this point, so the powers that be began pouring millions of dollars into the prison that would one day replace it, and everything the prisoners heard about Milhaven's design filled them with dread. It was going to have more gun towers than the pen,
more razor wire, and a fleet of attack dogs. There were rumors that every cell would have a solid steel door instead of bars, every cell would have security cameras, and every room would be bugged by state of the art voice recorders, listening in on and recording their every move, their every conversation. And this was all on top of
the changes they'd been observing at KP. Everything was more locked down than ever, The food was worse, the punishment more severe, and the mutual respect that was once possible between guard and inmate was a dinosaur of an earlier era.
Roger was less invested in all this angst than an earlier version of him might have been, because he had hope, hope that his lawyer would help him overturn this wrongful conviction in appeal, and he had hope in the form of his eighteen hundred pages, that one day he'd be able to do something with him. He had convinced himself that these pages had value. But on April fourteenth, nineteen seventy one, the Kingston Penitentiary was about to become an
all time bad place to have anything of value. On April fourteenth, the first dozen inmates were moved from KP to Millhaven, so the abstract boogeyman of this new prison had finally arrived at their door. Tension was at an all time high. Prisoners had been speaking in hushed tones for months about what they could do to stop this transfer to Millhaven from happening, and they've been brainstorming about what sort of power play they could make to fight
against it. But when you pulled the threads apart to trace what triggered the most horrifying thing to ever happen in the Canadian prison. It started with a dress code violation when we went on our tour of the Kingston Penitentiary.
In this one part, we walked into what looks like a big gymnasium like you'd see in high school, and to get in, there's a couple checkpoints with steel gates in this little bottleneck just before you walk in and through this bottleneck is where the inmates would pass into the gym where they would have their recreation time. They could exercise, play a game, or often they would just watch TV. I think they were a hockey game.
And then it was basically somewhere on this segment when the riot started.
To keep the groups manageable, the guards would bring inmates through the checkpoints to the recreation area only twenty men at a time. So it was in one of these checkpoints with steel bars all around them that guard named Decker, when glancing at an inmate named Knight, spotted a dress code violation. KP had a strict dress code that was enforced at all times that included, among other things, having your shirt tucked in. We stood in the exact corridor
where this happened. I would imagine it was a long partner wow a guard stand Tucker shirt at tuck that shirt in. The guard barked at the exact wrong inmate on the exact wrong days. Everyone in the checkpoint waited to see what Billy Knight would do, to see how this most respect of inmates would react to the upity tone of this cocky twenty seven year old guard. They didn't need to wait for very long, because Knight swung a sudden punch to the stomach of Decker and yelled,
that's the last order you're going to give. Within seconds, the inmates had the keys to get through the next barrier, where they overpowered the next guard and moved into the area. After that, they were making a break for the center Dawn, the effect of control center of the whole institution, where they knew that if they got control of that, the prison would be theirs. While all this was going on, Roger was sitting quietly in his cell when he heard
the sound of yelling in the distance. Where were you on April fourteenth, nineteen seventy one.
I was where I wish I wouldn't have been. I was in Kingston Penitentiary just before it exploded.
D Roger will take a break and then we'll come back and find out what did happen when somebody yelled bingo. In short order, the rogue inmates had captured six of the guards, taken them prisoner, and locked them up in their cell block. Word deliriously spread that the inmates had taken control of the place, as they said about the
urgent task of freeing every inmate in the pen. Some cell blocks were a cinch to unlock and required just a spinning of the wheel to open, while with others they needed to smash their way in by ripping the bars clean out of the wall. One by one, the men ran to the dome, whooping and hollering, disbelieving this sudden twist in their Wednesday evening. What were they going to do with this unlikeliest of opportunities. Well, I'll tell you the first thing they did. They smashed the shit
of the Kingston Penitentiary bell. Today you can go and see what remains of it at the Canadian Penitentiary Museum. During the riot, this was such a focal point of all their aggression and all their like let's take it out on the bell. One can't help but think of the scene with the printer from Office Space one of their things was not just take it, not just to assemble it, but to smash it as many pieces as they can. So it's amazing they actually have it here
with the actual pieces. Wow. There's a newspaper headline framed above the bell remains that reads, Jangling Bell tolls no longer. And the destruction of the bell was just the beginning. The prisoners have done some damage. They've smashed the three chapels and destroyed most of the locking systems throughout the cell block they occupy. They broke windows, kicked in doors, and broke every breakable thing there was. It was complete mayhem,
complete disorder. And after the initial wave of joy and anger and revel on the physical, it was time to think about what their next move was. With the six guards in their custody, they knew they had a very strong bargaining tip. If the inmates really were planning on getting some sort of message out to the public about how poorly they were being treated at the hands of the Canadian penal system and how afraid they were about what waited for them in Millhaven, they had a horrified
nation's undivided attention. In Kingston, Ontario, prisoners hold six guards and insist their demands be met or else the inmates needed to figure out what to do with their hostages. There, of course, were some who wanted to just kill the guards and not let this opportunity slide by, while others wanted to protect the guards because without them there was nothing stopping the police from just shooting their way in to regain control. But aside from the guards, there was
another group of hostages. There was even more disagreement over the undesirables. The undesirables are the men at the very bottom of the inmates social order, the rapists, child abusers, pedophiles and informants who were kept in Cell Block one D. The undesirables are kept completely separate from the general population for their own safety. If the main population ever got
their hands on them, they try to kill them. So now that the prison had fallen, the fate of Cell Block one D was very much in jeopardy, but for the time being, the riot leaders wanted to keep them safe. The inmates appointed a committee to speak on their behalf, and the two sides would meet regularly, giving updates and passing along their demands to the media. Number one medication for those who need it. Number two food they needed to feed their hostages and insisted on control of the kitchen,
and three security. They wanted assurance that there would be no surprise offensives that would jeopardize the lives of inmate and guard alike. At the bargaining table, the discussions appeared civil and well organized and intentioned, but everything was that a stalemate, with neither side budging. Many members of the public had no idea of the state of things on the inside, and found it easy to empathize with the inmates who'd been suffering out of sight of Canadian society
outside the wall. The police had the place surrounded and the Canadian Armed Forces were called in as the riot became the top story in the nation. But inside the prison, the main persistent thing was the cold. They'd recklessly smashed so many windows that the place felt like a Nordic castle, with the icy wind coming off Lake Ontario chilling them to the bone. As they ran low on things to keep the fires burning, Roger took the time to explore the place to see if he could find some snacks.
At first, and a little later he was involved in the making and hanging of one of the lasting images of the riot. The banner hung out the top dome window, which read under new management. Roger claims to have been part of the group who advocated for keeping the hostages safe and alive. There was a small group who worked in shifts to safeguard the prisoners from the wolf packs
who roamed the cell blocks thirsty for blood. But after a few days it became apparent that whatever civility had remained among the inmates in the first day or two was merely a mirage, and with the combination of the cold, the running low on supplies, and the growing desperation, there was no way this was going to have a happy ending. But no one would believe how horrifying a turn everything was about to take.
Everybody was going a little bit crazy, and they decided that they were going to drag the undesirables from d block here into the central part of the dome.
A small group of the most violent men in the place said enough was enough. If they were just gonna end up rotting away in Millhaven anyway, they might as well get to do something they'd always wanted to do.
They dragged them out, screaming, and they tied them to fourteen chairs with wire rope and chained. He held a kangaroo court.
In the central dome of the prison. There's a truly theatrical layout. All around the center circle are catwalks four stories high.
All these galities of the nags and demo stairways, and all these heart like figures all leaning over the rail in a spot like the high dome, shining on the floor just like a stage light.
The leader took the stage and asked the sea of faces above him, what shall we do, gentlemen, Cast right them, cut their throats, kill them. The faces shouted. As the bloodthirsty audience began rhythmically pounding the railings in anticipation. The man in the center shouted, the show is about to begin.
The twelve thirteen chairs were all eye together, and then they're rich, realistically tortured.
At first, the undesirables were beaten with clubs, kicked, slashed. Before long, blood began to pool on the dome floor as the hundreds looked on, horrified at the violence and depravity of their peers. At one point in the proceedings, a figure emerged on the makeshift stage to try and put a stop to the senseless violence.
One guy lost his mind for a moment and ran into this inner circle where the fourteen undesirables were being tortured, and everybody gave a gasp of shocked and said, the guy's crazy. He went in there and he says, you got to stop this torture. You got to stop this cruelty, and biff bang arm bars to the head, boots knives at him. He crawled out of the circle just barely alive. And that was one example to everybody else. Don't interfere or you'll end up tied up to that chair.
Some of the onlookers would try to slink away from the violence and go wander to a different part of the prison, but looking away was not an option.
Sort of wolf packs would roam around and they drag the guys out of their cell and you say, come back to the dome.
You need to show a force.
The army and the prison warden is looking through the windows of binnockers and they got to see that there's a shower.
After the initial beating of all the undesirables, they were covered in sheets and if you were one of the unfortunate souls in the circle, all you could hear were the sounds of steel bars snapping bones, the crunch of fists breaking noses, the moans of the beaten, and the gasps of the horrified crowd. The sounds alone made it obvious that not everyone would be making it out of the dome alive. One of the main undesirables taking the
worst of it was a convicted child molester. After having his ribs broken, his chair was tipped backward, his head bouncing off the cement.
And the rail walked over and took his knife slacks. This guy tied to the chair, crash and sank. Wo took a steel mop.
Actually it wasn't a steel mug. It was a chalice stolen from the chapel.
Fill the steel mop full of blood.
Look the guy tied up in the chair, hook him the eye said, here's to you, sucker, drank the guy's blood, took an iron bar and killed the.
Guy's It was the most savage ending imaginable. In the end, two of the undesirables were killed and the rest were left barely clinging to life. As the inmates shuffled out of the dome, most of them just wanted whatever gate
they'd opened to hell. To be permanently shut. With the end of the riot in sight, Roger took some cellophane he'd found in his wanderings and securely wrapped his eighteen hundred page manuscript, hoping that he could find a way to bring it with him wherever he was about to go.
I'm sure the pile had to be maybe fourteen sixteen inches high or more. That's a lot of sheets. That's a lot of sheet, not on how many piles he had.
Apart from his own life. It was the only thing he wanted to bring with him from this cursed place. A surrender was brokeered. The military and police moved in, and with machine guns trained on them, the inmates came out with their hands up, one at a time. When it was his turn, Roger emerged from the rubble with a cellophane wrapped manuscript held high above his head. He pleaded to keep it, but a guard tore the package from Roger's hands and tossed it into a heap of garbage.
As Roger protested in Vain, the horrible misstep that the inmates had made by riding when they did was that all it really accomplished was that they made their inevitable transfer to the Supermax and Millhaven happened ahead of schedule. Roger's name was called to board the bus, and when the inmates emerged onto the street outside the pen, there
was a considerable media presence. Many members of the public were holding up signs of support and were impressed with what the inmates had managed to pull off in their effort to get their message out. As the bus drove off to Millhaven, the inmates might have thought that maybe in the end they had done something that would affect positive change, that they had played their hand well, but they didn't know what was waiting for them when they
arrived at the haven. In a lifetime filled with beatings, the one that Roger received getting off the bus in Millhaven was perhaps the most consequential. When the bus arrived, there was a gag of Millhaven guards with their weapons drawn, ready to send a very strong message to the newbies. Fresh off of taking some of their brothers hostage, Roger and his fellow inmates were subject to walking a gauntlet.
Imagine a beating so bad and cruel that, even given what the inmates had just done in KPD, and even given the power imbalance that exists between inmates and guard that many of the guards forming the Gauntlet would later be arrested and tried for what they did to Roger and the other prisoners that day. Many of the inmates were clubbed and blackjacked and then were dragged inside to
their new home. And thus the Great Riot of seventy one had concluded if their actions did affect any positive change, they wouldn't feel it until many years in the future. Okay, are you still with me? Good, because here comes the fucking crazy part. So, in the aftermath of the riot, KP was obviously just a huge mess. Everything was mangled, everything was dirty, and so they began the long process of cleaning it all up.
They cleaned out the cells, you know, and everything was just tossed, just tossed in the middle of the yard in one great, big, great, big pile.
All the broken glass, bent and damaged cell doors and everyone's personal effects, including something very special to Roger, were all thrown in one big pile and hauled off to the city dump.
It was all gone, all his work, and that had been a few years. Uh, he just figured I've lost it all.
But there was a teacher, one of the school teachers who worked inside KP and in the aftermath of the riot, this teacher is like, what do you mean there's nothing left? I had a perfectly functional classroom with nice chairs and desks, and I had things in that classroom that were special to me. You knuckleheads just threw it all in the garbage. So then this teacher was like, I'm just gonna go the dump then to see if anything from my classroom
is salvageable. And you know what, I don't know if that teacher in the end was able to find what he was looking for at the dump. I don't know if he ended up finding any of his classroom materials that he was looking for. All I know is that he found something he wasn't looking for, because after a time coming through the rubble at the city dump, he was thinking about just getting out of there by points to his.
Hand, fell on corner of his package, and out of curiosity, he shook it loose and there was my manscript.
Taged wit is still in pact of.
My name on picture it. This teacher picks up this package in the rubble like it's Jumanji, and he tugs at the edge and discovers that Underneath several layers of plastic are the words Roger Koran inmate number nine zero three three, I Shit You Not. Go Boy is a production from Campside Media in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Go Boy was written and hosted by me
Sam Wellens. Our producer is Rob Lindsay of Paradox Pictures. Laine Rose is our senior producer. Sound design, mix and engineering by Garrett Tiedemant, original music by Garrett Tiedemant, fact checking by Michael Kenyon Meyer. Selected archival clips are from CBC Licensing. The book Go Boy was written by Roger Kuran. iHeart Podcasts executive producers are Lindsay Hoffman and Jennifer Bassett. Special thanks to Kingston Pentitentry Tours and Greg Guthrow from
Saint Lawrence Parks Commission. Thanks also to Canada's Penitentiary Museum, Mike Schreider, Dave Saint Ounge and Correctional Service Canada. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam hoff and Matt cher A special thanks to our Operations to Doug Slaywyn Ashley Warren, Sabina Marra, and Destiny Dingle. If you enjoyed Go Boy, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.