Thomas Silverstein entered the federal prison system in the late 1970s on a 15-year sentence for bank robbery and never left it. Inside the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, whose Control Unit was the most restrictive in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), he was convicted of three murders: two fellow inmates, Robert Chappelle in 1981 and Raymond "Cadillac" Smith in 1982, and a correctional officer, Merle Clutts, on October 22, 1983. An earlier conviction for killing an inmate at Leavenworth, Kansas, was reversed on appeal and never retried.
Hours after Clutts died, a second officer, Robert L. Hoffmann, was killed on the same unit by another prisoner, Clayton Fountain. The two deaths led the BOP to place the whole of Marion under a lockdown that lasted more than twenty years and helped shape the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Silverstein himself was held under a "no human contact" order from 1983 until his death in 2019, a period of isolation that federal courts examined, and upheld, in a lawsuit he brought in his last decade.
This account follows the court record wherever possible. The killings took place inside prisons, among men already serving long sentences, and several were connected in court testimony to a prison gang. The motives below are given as the courts stated them, and Silverstein's own denials and explanations are reported as his claims.
Silverstein was born in 1952 in California and grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Long Beach, according to Westword, the Denver weekly whose reporter Alan Prendergast covered him from 2007 until his death. Prendergast reported, citing Pete Earley's 1992 book The Hot House, that his biological father was a man named Thomas Conway, whom his mother divorced when he was four; she later married a man named Silverstein, whose surname he carried.
His sister, Sydney McMurray, told Westword in 2007 that as a teenager he was running from a violent home life and had developed a heroin addiction. He committed burglaries to pay for drugs. At 19, Westword reported, he was sent to San Quentin, the California state prison, for armed robbery.
After parole he was arrested again, this time for a series of robberies committed with relatives. Westword put the total taken at less than $1,400. Prison Legal News, reporting his death in 2019, described three bank robberies carried out with his father and a cousin. The federal court record is brief: the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals stated in 2014 that he began his time in federal custody in 1978, serving a fifteen-year sentence for bank robbery at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. He was 23 when he was sentenced, according to Westword.
At Leavenworth, Westword reported, Silverstein became closely associated with members of the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang that, according to the same account, was alleged to control the heroin trade inside the prison. A fellow inmate, Danny Atwell, was stabbed to death there. Silverstein and two other inmates, Edgar Hevle and Charles McEvoy, were indicted for the killing. Silverstein's case was severed and he was tried first.
The prosecution's theory, as the Tenth Circuit later summarized it, was that the three men killed Atwell because he refused to smuggle drugs other than marijuana into the prison for their group. Another inmate testified that Atwell had smuggled drugs for what was called the "California group" and was afraid of it. No one testified as an eyewitness to the killing. A principal government witness, James Schell, told the jury what McEvoy had allegedly said to him weeks afterward: that Silverstein had done the stabbing. A second inmate, Randy Arnold, testified that Silverstein had admitted it.
A jury convicted Silverstein in 1980, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, according to the district court in Colorado and the Tenth Circuit's 2014 summary. Nothing in the sources opened gives Danny Atwell's age, hometown or the sentence he was serving, or the exact date of his death. The two court accounts of timing also differ: the Tenth Circuit in 2014 said the BOP moved Silverstein to Marion in February 1979 because its internal investigation concluded he had killed Atwell, while the federal district court in Colorado said in 2010 that he was moved to Marion in November 1980, while the murder case was pending.
On June 21, 1984, the Tenth Circuit reversed the Atwell conviction and ordered a new trial (United States v. Silverstein, 737 F.2d 864). The court found no error in letting the jury hear about his membership in the Aryan Brotherhood, which it held was relevant to motive. But it ruled that McEvoy's statement, relayed through Schell, should not have been admitted, because it was made weeks after the killing, when the alleged conspiracy had already achieved its purpose. It also found that the prosecutor had improperly put before the jury, through questions he could not back up, statements Silverstein had supposedly made to another inmate who never testified. With no eyewitness and a dying declaration from Atwell that the court called "ambiguous at best," the judges could not say the errors were harmless.
The government never retried him. By then, the Tenth Circuit noted in 2014, Silverstein was already serving life sentences for other prison murders, and prosecutors declined to bring the Atwell case again. Legally, he died unconvicted of Danny Atwell's death. Later press accounts describe the reversal in other terms, as resting on perjured or shifting informant testimony; the appeals court's own grounds were the hearsay ruling and the improper questioning.
The penitentiary at Marion, in southern Illinois, opened in 1963, the year Alcatraz closed. By the late 1970s its Control Unit was the most restrictive segregation unit in the federal system. Westword reported that between 1979 and 1983 the prison recorded 81 assaults by inmates on other inmates and 44 on staff, and that 13 prisoners were killed. In 1988 the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, reviewing the later lockdown, described "an extraordinary history of inmate violence" at Marion and counted 11 murders in the four years before October 1983.
Control Unit prisoners lived one to a cell and were fed in their cells. When they left, they were handcuffed and escorted. Guards did not carry weapons in the presence of prisoners, a point the Seventh Circuit noted in its 1985 opinion. Silverstein told Westword that he spent much of his time in the unit learning to draw and paint.
Robert Marvin Chappelle was a Black inmate held in the Control Unit's C range. Westword described him as a member of the D.C. Blacks, a prison gang. The sources opened give nothing further about his life before prison, his age or his sentence.
According to the Seventh Circuit's 1984 opinion affirming the conviction (United States v. Silverstein, 732 F.2d 1338), the government's evidence was that Chappelle had "disrespected" an inmate named Vargas, a member of the Mexican Mafia, a gang allied with the Aryan Brotherhood. Vargas had planned to kill Chappelle himself, but a guard confiscated his knife. The indictment charged that Silverstein and Adolph Reynosa, a Mexican Mafia member, made contact about the killing in August 1981. Testimony at trial described Silverstein as one of three members of the Aryan Brotherhood's governing "commission" in the federal system and said he had taken responsibility for Chappelle because Chappelle was on his range.
Chappelle was found dead on the floor of his cell shortly after Silverstein and Clayton Fountain, who had been out for recreation together, were returned to their own cells. The medical evidence showed he had been strangled about an hour after eating, by a cord held by two people while he lay on his bed with his head against the bars. Testimony at the trial refers to November 22, 1981, as the date in question.
The government's principal witness was David Owens, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, whose account was supported by other inmates who said Silverstein and Reynosa had talked about the killing. Another inmate, Norman Matthews, took the stand for the defense and confessed to the killing himself, then invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege. The trial judge excluded his out-of-court confession, and the Seventh Circuit upheld that ruling, finding the confession did not fit the medical evidence that two men had held the cord.
The jury convicted Silverstein and Fountain of murder. Silverstein, Reynosa and Edgar Hevle were convicted of conspiracy to murder. Silverstein received life imprisonment for the murder and 20 years for the conspiracy, to run consecutively with the sentences he was already serving. Fountain received life; Hevle and Reynosa received 40 years each. The Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Posner decided April 26, 1984 and amended July 26, 1984, affirmed all of the convictions.
Silverstein always denied killing Chappelle, according to Westword.
Raymond Smith, known as "Cadillac," was a leader of the D.C. Blacks. Westword reported that he was one of Chappelle's closest friends and that, shortly after Chappelle's death, the BOP transferred him into the Marion Control Unit from another prison. The sources opened give no further detail of his life or sentence.
In September 1982, the Tenth Circuit stated in 2014, Silverstein and Fountain killed Smith by stabbing him 67 times with homemade knives made from bed frames and towel racks. The Seventh Circuit's 1985 opinion records how the case ended for Silverstein: he pleaded guilty to that murder and received his third life sentence (the count included the Atwell sentence, which had not yet been reversed).
Silverstein's own account, given to Earley and repeated to Westword, is that Smith had tried to stab him and to shoot him with a homemade gun within days of arriving, and that he and Fountain cut their way out of an exercise cage with a piece of hacksaw blade and attacked Smith in the shower. He described the killing as self-defense and said the guards had wanted one of the two men to kill the other. Those statements are his; no court accepted a self-defense claim, and he entered a guilty plea.
After these killings, the Seventh Circuit noted, the prison required three guards to escort Silverstein and Fountain, separately and in handcuffs, every time either man left his cell for recreation, the law library or the shower.
Merle E. Clutts was 51 and lived in Cobden, Illinois. He held the rank of senior officer specialist. According to the Daily Egyptian, the Southern Illinois University newspaper, he had worked at Marion since May 1964, and the BOP's memorial page records nineteen years of service. He was married; his widow, Joeann, was 76 when The Denver Post interviewed her at her Illinois home in 2011. His name is on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C., on panel 32, W-5, and the BOP lists him among its staff killed in the line of duty.
In the months after Smith's death, Silverstein came to regard Clutts, a regular officer in the Control Unit, as his main antagonist, Westword reported. Silverstein gave different explanations over the years: that Clutts searched and damaged his cell, withheld his mail, spoiled his artwork, and tried to set him up to be attacked by other prisoners. The BOP denied that Clutts harassed him.
On the morning of Saturday, October 22, 1983, Clutts was one of the three officers escorting Silverstein back from the shower in the Control Unit, known as H unit. According to the Seventh Circuit's account, Silverstein stopped at the cell of another prisoner, Randy Gometz, while two of the guards were some distance away, and reached his cuffed hands through the bars. The third guard heard the handcuffs come open and saw Gometz show a homemade knife made from the iron leg of a bed. Silverstein took the knife and attacked Clutts. The BOP's account adds that he had broken away from his escort and that the other prisoner both freed him from his restraints and gave him the knife. The time was about 10:15 a.m., according to the Daily Egyptian's report two days later; the BOP gives about 10:30.
Clutts died of his wounds. Silverstein surrendered to other staff, the BOP says. Afterward, the court recorded, he told officers it was "no cop thing" but a personal matter between him and Clutts, and said Clutts had disrespected him.
That evening, at about 8:30 p.m., Clayton Fountain was being returned from the recreation room on the same unit. He reached his cuffed hands into another prisoner's cell, came out free of the cuffs and holding a knife, and attacked all three of his escorts. Robert L. Hoffmann, 53, a senior officer specialist from the Buncombe area who had worked at Marion since February 1971, left a safe area to help his colleagues and was fatally stabbed, according to the BOP. Officers Roger Ditterline, 30, and Jerry Powles, 35, were wounded; the Seventh Circuit said Ditterline was left permanently disabled. Clutts and Hoffmann were the second and third officers killed in Marion's history, a prison spokesman told the Daily Egyptian. The FBI took the weapons and opened its investigation; the inmates' names were not released at first.
Silverstein and Gometz were tried together before a jury in federal court; Fountain was tried separately before the same judge for Hoffmann's killing. At trial Silverstein claimed self-defense, testifying that Clutts had been planning to let Cuban prisoners out of their cells to kill him. The Seventh Circuit said any such threat was not imminent and that he had other choices, such as complaining to other staff.
The jury convicted Silverstein of first-degree murder and Gometz of aiding and abetting. The trial judge imposed terms of 50 to 150 years and ordered restitution to the Clutts estate and the Department of Labor. On July 8, 1985, the Seventh Circuit, again in an opinion by Judge Posner, affirmed the convictions (United States v. Fountain, 768 F.2d 790). It held that the federal murder statute required a life sentence for first-degree murder, vacated the terms of years, and sent the cases back for life sentences and recalculated restitution. Senior Judge Swygert dissented in part and would have reversed Silverstein's and Fountain's convictions over the prosecution's cross-examination about their earlier crimes.
The opinion is often quoted for its remarks on punishment. Because federal capital punishment for murder had lapsed after the Supreme Court's decision in Furman v. Georgia, the judges wrote that life was the only sentence available, and that the facts "cry out for a federal death penalty for prison murders." They added that the remedy lay with Congress. Gometz, the court recorded, had told the sentencing judge that even a million-year sentence would leave them eligible for parole after ten years.
In total, the Tenth Circuit stated in 2014, the three convictions left Silverstein serving three consecutive life sentences plus 45 years.
The BOP's response to the two killings was to put the entire penitentiary under lockdown, carrying out a plan, Westword reported, that BOP studies had proposed in 1979 and 1981. In 1988 the Seventh Circuit described "the 'permanent lockdown' that began in 1983": each prisoner confined to a one-man cell, recreation of seven to eleven hours a week, a box placed over handcuffs to stop the locks being picked, legs often shackled, and routine rectal searches for some prisoners (Bruscino v. Carlson, 854 F.2d 162). Prisoners sued, alleging that guards beat them in the weeks after the killings and conducted searches in a humiliating way. The magistrate and district judge did not believe their testimony about staff misconduct, and the appeals court affirmed the dismissal of the suit. The court counted 11 murders in the four years before the lockdown and three in the four and a half years after it.
The lockdown lasted until 2006, when Marion was reduced to a medium-security prison, Slate reported in 2013. By then the federal system had built a prison designed around the Marion model: the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, which opened in Florence, Colorado, in 1994. Westword reported in 2007 that much of the justification for building it came from the killings of the two officers at Marion. Earley told The Denver Post in 2019 that Silverstein's killing of Clutts "really set the stage for Supermax."
On November 2, 1983, the BOP moved Silverstein from Marion to the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. In August 1984, under a memorandum from the BOP director, he was placed in a special unit with "non-contact" status, limited visits and restricted recreation, the Tenth Circuit recorded. Westword described the arrangement as a "no human contact" order. In his later lawsuit Silverstein said that for his first year in Atlanta he had no window or clock, lights that stayed on 24 hours a day, no contact with other prisoners, and no social visits, phone calls or reading material; he conceded that basic privileges followed after that year. The district court's description of the Atlanta quarters was three linked, windowless cells of 42 square feet each, under constant camera surveillance.
In November 1987, Cuban detainees rioted at the Atlanta penitentiary and took staff hostage. Other prisoners released Silverstein from his cell, according to the Colorado district court; Westword reported that he was loose in the prison for about a week. The BOP says the rioters turned him over to the authorities. Westword reported that his surrender was one of the government's demands in the negotiations and that he did not harm anyone during that week, a point he later cited in arguing that he could live in less restrictive conditions.
On December 1, 1987, the BOP moved him back to Leavenworth. For his first period there (eighteen months, according to the Tenth Circuit; a year, according to the district court) he was held in a basement cell without hot water or outdoor recreation, where he often did not receive three meals a day. Earley interviewed him there for The Hot House, describing a cage under lights kept on around the clock, Westword reported.
In 1989 he was moved to a cell in the Special Housing Unit of about 136 square feet, with a television, a writing area and adjoining indoor and outdoor recreation spaces. Westword reported that staff and prisoners called it the Silverstein Suite. He was under constant audio and video surveillance, and for all but a year or two of his seventeen years at Leavenworth he could not turn off the lights in his cell, the BOP conceded. From 2001 to 2005 no other prisoner had contact with him, and four officers escorted him whenever he left the cell.
His disciplinary record, as the courts summarized it, included assaults on three staff members, a threat to a staff member, an escape attempt in which he posed as a United States Marshal, and the discovery of hacksaw blades, handcuff keys and lock picks hidden on his person. All of those incidents dated from the 1980s or earlier. The BOP did not dispute that he had received no disciplinary citation since 1988.
On July 12, 2005, the BOP transferred him to ADX Florence, because Leavenworth was being converted to a medium-security prison that could not hold him. He was first placed on Range 13, the most restrictive part of the prison, where his only neighbor for a time was Ramzi Yousef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Westword reported. When the two men began talking by shouting through their doors, a barrier was put up in the corridor.
On April 3, 2008, the BOP's regional director ordered him moved to the prison's D-Unit, its general-population unit, where prisoners still eat alone in their cells but can talk from cell to cell, have a window and receive ten hours of recreation a week. He remained there for the rest of his life.
Silverstein wrote about his isolation for publications and supporters outside. In one piece, quoted by Westword, he called solitary confinement "a slow constant peeling of the skin." In a 2008 letter quoted by CNN and CBS News, he wrote that it was almost more humane to kill someone immediately than to "intentionally bury a man alive." His sister told Westword in 2007 that guards who dealt with him daily spoke well of him. The BOP's position, set out in an administrative response quoted in the same article, was that he was serving three consecutive life terms plus 45 years for bank robbery and murder, including the murder of BOP staff, and was a member of a disruptive group and an escape risk.
In November 2007, with lawyers from the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, including professor Laura Rovner, Silverstein sued the BOP in federal court in Denver. He argued that his decades of isolation violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment and that the BOP's twice-yearly reviews of his status, which his lawyers called sham proceedings, denied him due process.
In March 2010 U.S. District Judge Philip A. Brimmer dismissed several claims but allowed the Eighth Amendment claim against the BOP and a due process claim to proceed (Silverstein v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 704 F. Supp. 2d 1077). In a 64-page declaration filed in 2011, Silverstein wrote that he felt his words of regret were inadequate to express his remorse for killing Clutts. He continued to deny two of the murders for which he had been convicted and said he had been living in fear of reprisals when he killed Clutts, The Denver Post reported. The BOP did not dispute that he had publicly apologized to the Clutts family.
Joeann Clutts told The Denver Post in 2011 that she did not believe he should ever be released from solitary confinement. She said the death penalty would have been the only fitting punishment, had it been available for federal crimes at the time, and that the rest of her family felt the same way.
Later in 2011 Judge Brimmer granted summary judgment to the BOP. Westword reported his finding that conditions at ADX were not "atypically extreme." On May 22, 2014, the Tenth Circuit affirmed (Silverstein v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, No. 12-1450). Its unpublished order and judgment, written by Senior Judge Wade Brorby for a panel with Judges Lucero and O'Brien, accepted that Silverstein had spent thirty years in isolation and that he had been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and mild cognitive impairment. It held that he had not shown the BOP disregarded a substantial risk to his health, given the improvements in his conditions since 2005, his regular psychological evaluations, and what the court called the security risk he posed. The court cited the BOP's evidence that he had been a leader in the Aryan Brotherhood, that the gang did not allow members to leave, and that members of the D.C. Blacks, by then known as the D.C. Crew, might try to kill him to avenge Smith. Silverstein said he was no longer a member. The court noted that the BOP's own staff had rated him a low risk of violence since 2002, though the BOP said that rating depended on his isolation. A group of psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health organizations had filed a brief supporting him.
Silverstein was admitted to St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado, in February 2019 for surgery, according to the Jefferson County chief deputy coroner, Dan Pruett, quoted by The Denver Post. He died in intensive care there on May 11, 2019, aged 67. Westword reported that he had been hospitalized for weeks with complications after heart surgery, and a BOP spokesman confirmed the death. He was still in federal custody, assigned to ADX Florence. CNN described him as the federal prisoner believed to have spent the longest time in solitary confinement, more than 35 years.
Merle Clutts and Robert Hoffmann are remembered on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial and in the BOP's list of its staff killed in the line of duty. The BOP's memorial page for Clutts ends with the words "Merle, you will never be forgotten."
Clayton Fountain, who killed Hoffmann, remained in isolation and died at the federal medical center in Springfield, Missouri, on July 12, 2004. The BOP describes him as a military prisoner who had been serving two life sentences for murder before the Marion killings.
The Marion lockdown and the ADX that followed it became the model for long-term isolation units in the federal system and in many states, as Slate and Westword both reported. Silverstein's case, through his 2007 lawsuit, became one of the leading legal tests of whether decades of solitary confinement violate the Constitution; the courts held that in his circumstances they did not.
Pete Earley's The Hot House (1992), a reported account of Leavenworth, contains the best-known portrait of Silverstein from his years in the basement cell. Earley told The Denver Post in 2019 that he had corresponded with Silverstein for 32 years and had been working with him on an autobiography.
The Atwell killing. A jury convicted Silverstein, but the conviction was reversed in 1984 and the government chose not to retry him. He is legally unconvicted. The appeals court's stated grounds were improperly admitted hearsay and improper questioning by the prosecutor, and the decision is dated June 21, 1984.
The Chappelle killing. Silverstein was convicted by a jury and the conviction was affirmed, but he always denied it. Another inmate, Norman Matthews, confessed on the stand; the courts found his confession did not match the medical evidence that two men had held the cord.
The Smith killing. Silverstein pleaded guilty, but he later described the killing as self-defense and said Smith had attacked him first. That account comes from Silverstein himself, through Earley and Westword, and was never tested in court.
The reasons for the Clutts killing. At trial Silverstein said Clutts planned to release Cuban prisoners to kill him; the court found no imminent threat. His other complaints about Clutts, such as damaged cells and artwork and withheld mail, are his own claims; the BOP denied that Clutts harassed him. Immediately afterward he called it a personal matter in which Clutts had disrespected him.
The Marzloff killing. At the 1983 trial of another inmate, Barry Mills, for the May 20, 1979 killing of John Sherman Marzloff at USP Atlanta, testimony said Silverstein had ordered it over a drug debt. Silverstein was not charged. The Tenth Circuit in 2014 said he had been "implicated" in this killing and in Atwell's.
Gang role. Courts accepted testimony that Silverstein was a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood in the federal system, and the BOP treated that membership as permanent. Silverstein said he had left the gang, and his supporters disputed that it should define him. The count of how many people he killed also varies between sources, which sometimes add the reversed Atwell case to the three convictions.
Numbers. The Seventh Circuit says Clutts was stabbed 29 times; Westword, Slate and Prison Legal News give about 40. This account follows the court.
1952: Thomas Silverstein is born in California; he grows up in Long Beach.
About 1971: Sent to San Quentin for armed robbery at 19 (Westword).
1978: Begins a 15-year federal sentence for bank robbery at USP Leavenworth, Kansas.
About 1978 to 1979: Inmate Danny Atwell is stabbed to death at Leavenworth.
February 1979 or November 1980: Moved to the Control Unit at USP Marion, Illinois (the courts give different dates).
May 20, 1979: John Sherman Marzloff is killed at USP Atlanta; another inmate is later convicted, with testimony implicating Silverstein.
1980: Convicted of Atwell's murder and sentenced to life.
August 1981: Contact between Silverstein and Adolph Reynosa about Chappelle, as charged in the indictment.
1981 (trial testimony refers to November 22): Robert Chappelle is strangled in his Marion cell.
September 1982: Raymond "Cadillac" Smith is stabbed to death at Marion.
October 22, 1983: Silverstein kills Officer Merle Clutts at about 10:15 a.m.; Clayton Fountain kills Officer Robert Hoffmann at about 8:30 p.m.
Late October 1983: Marion is placed under lockdown.
November 2, 1983: Silverstein is transferred to USP Atlanta.
April 26, 1984: The Seventh Circuit affirms the Chappelle convictions (amended July 26, 1984).
June 21, 1984: The Tenth Circuit reverses the Atwell conviction; it is never retried.
August 1984: Placed in "non-contact" status in a special unit at Atlanta.
July 8, 1985: The Seventh Circuit affirms the Clutts conviction and orders life sentences.
November 1987: Released from his cell by rioting Cuban detainees at Atlanta; turned over to authorities.
December 1, 1987: Moved to a basement cell at Leavenworth.
1988: Last disciplinary citation; the Seventh Circuit upholds the Marion lockdown in Bruscino v. Carlson.
1989: Moved to a cell in Leavenworth's Special Housing Unit.
1994: ADX Florence opens in Colorado.
July 12, 2004: Clayton Fountain dies in federal custody.
July 12, 2005: Silverstein is transferred to ADX Florence.
2006: Marion's lockdown ends when it becomes a medium-security prison.
November 28, 2007: Files suit against the BOP in federal court in Denver.
April 3, 2008: Ordered moved to the ADX general-population unit.
March 2010: Judge Brimmer lets his Eighth Amendment claim proceed.
2011: Files a declaration expressing remorse for killing Clutts; the district court grants summary judgment to the BOP.
May 22, 2014: The Tenth Circuit affirms.
February 2019: Admitted to St. Anthony Hospital, Lakewood, Colorado.
May 11, 2019: Dies in custody, aged 67.