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Jack Henry ABBOTT
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics: Author
Number of victims: 2
Date of murders: 1965 / 1980
Date of birth: January 21, 1944
Victims profile:: A fellow inmate / Richard Adan, 22
Method of murder: Stabbing with knife
Location: Utah/New York, USA
Status: Sentenced to fifteen years to life on April 15, 1982. Hanged himself in his prison cell on February 10, 2002
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Jack Henry ABBOTT
Jack Henry Abbott (January 21, 1944–February 10, 2002) was an American criminal and author. He was released from prison after gaining praise for his writing and lauded by a number of high-profile literary critics, but almost immediately he committed a murder and was locked up for the rest of his life.
He was born on a U.S. Army base in Michigan to an American soldier and a Chinese woman. As a child Abbott was in trouble with teachers and later the law, and by the age of sixteen he was sent to a reform school.
Prison and release
In 1965, aged twenty-one, Jack Abbott was serving a sentence for forgery in a Utah prison when he stabbed a fellow inmate to death. He was given a sentence of three to twenty years for this offense, and in 1971 his sentence was increased by a further nineteen years after he escaped and committed a bank robbery in Colorado. Behind bars he was troublesome and refused to obey guard's orders and spent a lot of time in solitary confinement.
In 1977 he read that author Norman Mailer was writing about convicted killer Gary Gilmore. Abbott wrote to Mailer and offered to write about his time behind bars and the conditions he was in. Mailer agreed and helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, Abbott's book on life in the prison system consisting of his letters to Mailer.
Mailer supported Abbott's attempts to gain parole, which were successful in June 1980 when Abbott was released. He went to New York City and was the toast of the literary scene for a short while.
Norman Mailer was subjected to some criticism for his role in getting Jack Abbott released and was accused of being so blinded by Abbott's evident talent for writing that he did not take into account Abbott's propensity for violence.
In a 1992 interview in The Buffalo News, Mailer said that his involvement with Abbott was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in."
Murder and return to prison
On the morning of July 18, just six weeks after getting out of prison, Jack Abbott went to a small cafe called the Binibon in Manhattan. He clashed with 22-year-old Richard Adan, son-in-law of the restaurant's owner, over Adan's telling him the restroom was for staff only. The short-tempered Abbott stabbed Adan in the chest, killing him.
The very next day, unaware of Abbott's crime, the New York Times ran a positive review of The Belly of the Beast.
After some time on the run, Abbott was arrested and charged with murdering Richard Adan. At his trial in January 1982, he was convicted of manslaughter and given fifteen years to life.
Apart from the advance fee of $12,500, Abbott did not receive any profits from The Belly of the Beast, as Richard Adan's widow successfully sued him for $7.5 million in damages, which meant she received all the money from the book's sales.
There was a tragic irony to the murder, not lost on the community of aspiring writers and actors in New York. While Abbott was an accomplished writer, Adan was both an actor and a playwright, whose talent was just beginning to be recognized: shortly before his murder his first play had been accepted for production by the La Mama theatre company.
Final years
In 1987 Abbott published another book titled My Return, which was not a success. It contained a great deal of self-pity, but no remorse for his crimes. In fact, Abbott blamed his crimes on the prison system and the government and said he wanted an apology from society for the way he had been treated.
He appeared before the parole board in 2001, but his application was turned down because of his failure to express remorse and his lengthy criminal record and disciplinary problems in prison.
On February 10, 2002, Jack Abbott hanged himself in his prison cell using a makeshift noose constructed from his bedsheets and shoelaces. He left a suicide note, whose contents have not been made public.
Jack Henry Abbot, 58
By Bruce Jackson
Buffalo Report 1 March 2002
Jack Henry Abbott hanged himself with a bedsheet and shoelace in Wende Correctional Faculty on Sunday, February 10. At first his family was convinced he'd been murdered. "He wouldn't have killed himself that way," his sister told a reporter. Maybe a bedsheet and shoelace comprise an improbable instrument for Abbott, but they're equally improbable as a penitentiary murder weapon. In all the years I did research in prisons I never heard of anyone being strung up by a bedsheet and a shoelace. It's not how it's done.
Thus far, no evidence has turned up suggesting anybody had a hand in hanging Jack Henry Abbott other than Jack Henry Abbott. Two coroners, one hired by the state and the other hired by the family, have called it suicide and the prison authorities say they have a suicide note. They haven't released the note and they haven't said why they won't let anybody see it, but those guys adore secrets and maybe the note said true bad things about them they don't want anybody to know. Like Kaleida with the Hunter Group report.
Jack Henry Abbott spent the nine years before his eighteenth birthday in Utah reformatories. He was free for six months, then he was sent to the Utah penitentiary to do time for writing bad checks. He got more felony time three years later when he stabbed one inmate to death and injured another in a prison brawl. He robbed a bank during a brief escape in 1971; that earned him a nineteen-year federal sentence on top of the state time. He was then twenty-five years old.
In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner's Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott's letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott's first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).
When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.
Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that "they're the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn't know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will." He and several other men on the Row found the book's success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were.
While Abbott was at the halfway house he was the darling of New York literary society. He was on "Good Morning, America," and went to fancy parties. I heard Mailer talk about him several times on tv and remember thinking, "You've found your own Gary Gilmore." Mailer had never gotten to meet Gary Gilmore and I'd always thought that rankled him: he was hired to work on Executioner's Song by Lawrence Schiller after Gilmore's execution and he based his Gilmore dialog on Schiller's extensive interview tapes.
With Abbott, he had his own his pet convict. It was like those people who get a big animal you're not supposed to have and show it to you on a leash with a jewel-encrusted collar. You don't know if you're supposed to admire the animal or them for having it on the leash with the jewel-encrusted collar. Well, yes, you do know.
If Abbott had stayed out of trouble for eight weeks, he would have gone on parole. He didn't make it. Six weeks after he got to New York, he stabbed to death a waiter named Richard Adan. Because of his previous record, Abbott received the maximum sentence: 15 years to life. After he went back to prison Abbott wrote a second book, My Return (1987). That's a title that should have been used by Douglas MacArthur about getting off the barge in Leyte or Charles de Gaulle on having a cognac in Les Deux Magots after sitting out WWII in London. Or some politician who had been voted out of office and got back in again next time around because his successor was worse than he'd been. My Return.
I didn't like the book, and said so in a review. Shortly thereafter, a woman who had become involved with him after he got the manslaughter sentence sent me a copy of the pro se brief he'd sent to a New York judge a short time before. He was asking the judge to set him free. In her cover letter she told me that, like nearly everyone else, I'd failed to understand his sensibility. She said that if I read his brief carefully I'd have a better understanding of the kind of man Jack Henry Abbott was.
In that, she was correct, though I didn't come to the understanding she had in mind. I was struck by the fact that in the entire document Abbott wrote in the hope his sentence would be set aside, he never referred to Richard Adan by name. He referred only to "the deceased." The part that especially caught my attention consisted of these two sentences:
There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill. The deceased in this case was inflicted a single wound under circumstances which would have demanded the infliction of more wounds, if the single wound had been inflicted with the intent to kill and not merely to repel him.
I'll translate that into English for you: "They never proved I meant to kill the guy. If somebody like me really wanted to kill a guy like that, you think I'd stab him only once? Moi?" But that's not what Jack Henry Abbott wrote. What he wrote was,
There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill. The deceased in this case was inflicted a single wound under circumstances which would have demanded the infliction of more wounds, if the single wound had been inflicted with the intent to kill and not merely to repel him.
Jack Henry Abbott couldn't lie about the facts of the killing (there were witnesses); the only issue was the meaning of those facts. What impressed me about Abbott's statement is how astutely he had used language so he could talk about what happened without admitting any guilt or responsibility for what happened. He slipped into the passive voice, which has no actor, no agent. Things happen but nobody's there doing them. Scientists write in the passive all the time because they like to pretend the hand of humans didn't influence what went on: "The measurements were taken and were observed to be....Therefore, it was concluded that...."
We all do it when we feel the need. We don't think, "I'm switching into the passive now" any more than an experienced driver thinks about when to move the right foot from the accelerator to the brake pedal. Little kids do it all the time: "How did that plate full of cookies wind up on the floor?" "It fell."
After reading Abbott's statement I understood that there was in language a way to acknowledge events without in any way accepting responsibility or accountability for them. Language, I decided, had profound moral power that could appear to recast the very facts its users purport to present.
"His life was tragic from beginning to end," Norman Mailer said in a prepared statement after he learned of the suicide. "I never knew a man who had a worse life."
I don't know about that. Based on the two books and the pro se brief, Jack Henry Abbott was a man whose life made perfect sense to him, a man for whom the clumsy organization of the world was proof of the world's continuing inadequacy. I don't know what made him that way, why it was okay for him to kill that guy in prison and that waiter in Greenwich Village, and do all the other stuff he got locked up for. But those are the things he did and that's the way he was, right up to the end when he tied that bedsheet to the shoelace and quit the game on his own terms in his own good time.
Mailer and the Murderer
By Sewell Chan - The New York Times
November 12, 2007
A tidbit from Charles McGrath’s lengthy obituary of Norman Mailer, who died on Saturday, intrigued us: Mailer’s role in helping to win parole for Jack Henry Abbott, a felon, in 1981. Mailer championed Mr. Abbott’s release, citing the quality of the prisoner’s writings, and he agreed to hire Mr. Abbott as a research assistant. But Mr. Abbott went on to commit another murder within weeks of his parole.
The episode was one of the low points of Mailer’s long and storied life, as a visit to The Times’s online archives show.
According to a detailed profile by M. A. Farber of The Times, Mr. Abbott was born on Jan. 21, 1944, in Michigan. His father, who was in the armed forces, was of Irish descent; his mother, of Chinese. He spent most of his early childhood in foster homes, and was placed in a school for delinquent boys at age 12. In 1963, after being accused of breaking into a shoe store and stealing some checks that he made out to himself, he was sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison at the Utah state penitentiary. In 1966, while serving that term, he was given a concurrent sentence of three to 20 years for the fatal knifing of a fellow inmate. In 1971, he escaped from prison and robbed a savings and loan association in Denver. He was convicted of armed robbery and given a 19-year federal sentence.
He ended up, in 1979, at a federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., where he became an avid reader and started a correspondence with Jerzy Kosinski, the Polish-born novelist. By then, he had also sent a letter to Mailer, after noticing in a newspaper article that Mailer was writing a book based on the life of the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, who was executed in Utah. (The book, “The Executioner’s Song,” was published in 1979 and is considered by many to be Mailer’s masterpiece.) Mr. Abbott offered to help Mailer understand prison life. “Mr. Mailer was deeply impressed with the literary quality of Mr. Abbott’s subsequent letters, written by hand and often 20 pages or more,” Mr. Farber wrote in The Times.
In 1980, The New York Review of Books published a selection from the letters, with a brief introduction by Mailer. Erroll McDonald, a young Random House editor who was looking for new talent, signed Mr. Abbott to a book contract with a $12,500 advance. The book would be made up of excerpts from the letters to Mailer, who would write a longer introduction. Meanwhile, Mr. Abbott was trying to obtain parole, but first he had to complete his state sentence in Utah for killing the inmate.
In January 1981, federal authorities sent Mr. Abbott back to Utah, where he was automatically considered for parole. By then, his book was being edited for publication and he had a job offer from Mailer as a research assistant. In June, Mailer met Mr. Abbott at the airport, and the inmate, now free, was admitted to a halfway house on East Third Street.
On the night of July 17, Mr. Abbott and two women were at the Binibon, a restaurant in the East Village, when Mr. Abbott got up from his table and asked Richard Adan, a 22-year-old waiter and aspiring actor, to direct him to the toilet. Mr. Adan explained that the toilet could be reached only through the kitchen, and because the restaurant did not have accident insurance for customers, only employees could use the bathroom. Mr. Abbott argued with him. They took their dispute outside, where Mr. Abbott stabbed Mr. Adan to death, early in the morning of July 18.
The following day, July 19, The New York Times Book Review, unaware of Mr. Abbott’s crime, published a review of his book, “In the Belly of the Beast.” The reviewer, Terrence Des Pres, a Colgate University professor, wrote that the work was ‘’awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is indelible, and as an articulation of penal nightmare it is completely compelling.'’
That same day, the police announced that they were searching for Mr. Abbott for killing the waiter. Federal authorities joined in the manhunt. Meanwhile, Mr. Farber of The Times reconstructed Mr. Abbott’s mental and emotional state, through scores of interviews with people who knew him and a review of his medical and legal records, while Michiko Kakutani, a cultural critic for The Times, wrote an extended essay about themes in Mr. Abbott’s book and their relation to his shocking new crime.
On Sept. 23, 1981, Mr. Abbott was seized in Louisiana. He was indicted on Oct. 7. Mr. Farber weighed in with an article chronicling the manhunt.
Mr. Abbott, who chose to represent himself in court, testified about his harrowing experiences in foster care and in prisons and admitted to the killing. On Jan. 21, 1982, he was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and on April 15, he was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
At the time, many people blamed not only Mailer, but also Mr. Abbott’s book editor and even Robert Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, for having supported his release from prison. But Henry Howard, the waiter’s father-in-law, said it was the criminal justice system, not Mailer, that was at fault:
I’m not angry at Mailer or Random House. It’s their job to recognize writing talent and they saw it in Jack Abbott. My quarrel is with the prison authorities, with the Establishment. It’s their job to decide who goes out of prison, and not because of some pressure from great writers or publishers.
Mr. Abbott came out with a new book, “My Return,” in 1986. In 1990, Mr. Adan’s widow filed a civil lawsuit against Mr. Abbott, seeking $10 million in damages. In court, Mr. Abbott maintained that his attack on Mr. Adan had been so quick that there was no suffering. Again representing himself, he cross-examined the widow, at one point berating her for weeping. On June 15, 1990, a jury awarded Mr. Adan’s family $7.57 million in damages. (Mr. Abbott was already barred from using any money he earned from the Adan murder under the so-called Son of Sam law, a New York statute that prevents criminals from profiting from any crimes they commit.)
On Feb. 10, 2002, Mr. Abbott was found dead in his prison cell in Alden, N.Y., near Buffalo. He had committed suicide.
Vir: murderpedia.org
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