Mike Lear doesn’t sugar coat the darker sides of the Missouri State Penitentiary.
It wasn’t a wrongdoing or a job that led Mike Lear to the Missouri State Penitentiary (MSP). Mike found himself behind prison walls for his passion for history and the opportunity to release his inner performer. Mike, who works as the multimedia services coordinator for the Missouri House of Representatives by day, gives history tours of the now-closed institution. During his tours, he strives to present guests with a sense of reality through dramatic storytelling, which can include stories of violent crimes and extreme punishments.
“I try to make people understand in a very real sense what happened to human beings there,” Mike says. “The prison was a microcosm of what was going on in the world — just and unjust.”
One tale of the prison focuses on Martha Casto, a female prisoner sentenced for killing her abusive husband. Martha was sent to MSP in 1843, shortly after the penitentiary opened. One morning, as Martha’s husband was sleeping off a night of drinking, he awoke and told her to get up and get breakfast for him and her two children and then to commence saying her prayers or else she would not live to see the next day’s sunrise. He then rolled over in their bed and went back to sleep.
“It’s probably not the smartest thing to threaten someone and then roll over and go back to sleep,” Mike says.
After her husband went back to sleep, Martha murdered him with an ax. There was no women’s prison at the time, so Martha was sent to MSP where she was the second woman to live within the prison’s confines. While being imprisoned, Martha, who was released during the day to work outside the prison walls for local businessmen, became pregnant. The father was never revealed, and Martha went on to give birth to her second daughter Sarah, who she raised for a year within the confines of the prison’s walls. When word got out that she was raising a child in prison, a petition was written and signed by many political figures, most of whom were legislators serving in the Missouri General Assembly, asking the governor to release Martha because of the cruel conditions of her confinement. Nine days after the petition was written, Martha was pardoned by Gov. John C. Edwards, and she was released from MSP in January of 1845. Her story went on to be featured on “Who Do You Think You Are?” a genealogy documentary series aired on NBC and TLC. The show revealed that her great-great-great-granddaughter is actress Cynthia Nixon, who is best known for her role in “Sex and the City.”
Unfortunately, there are also stories of violence that happened within the walls of MSP. By the 1960s, MSP earned the nickname “the bloodiest 47 acres in America” for a reason. This name came from stories like the sad tale of Walter Lee Donnell. Walter was a member of a St. Louis gang, who, upon his arrest, testified against some of his partners in crime. Snitches, as informants were often called, typically faced a rough time behind bars. Because Walter supposedly had a price on his head, he was placed in a cell on death row for his own protection. That was until one night in 1954 when the most infamous riot in MSP history broke out. During the chaos, a group of inmates seized the opportunity to make Walter pay for his traitorous actions.
“Imagine what it might be like to know you have a price on your head, that the inmates are coming for you, and there’s not a thing you can do but sit there and hope,” Mike says.
In order to get to Walter, the inmates had to use a sledgehammer to break through a wall to get the keys to his cell. All the while, Walter was trapped, listening to the taunts of the inmates who wanted to kill him and, finally, the footsteps of the men coming for him. In the end, Walter suffered a long and painful death at the hands of his fellow prisoners.
For those curious about more stories like these, Mike hosts a true crime podcast called “Show Me Murder,” which can be found on Spotify and Audible. The podcast builds on his experience as an MSP tour guide and his years of exhaustive research about the prison.
“It’s my hope that the prison will continue to stand and be a part of history for generations to come,” Mike says. “The more aware the public is, the less chance the prison and its history will disappear altogether.”