Speaker 1: M a wall street line, shackle change, ohsome gird, it's
calling my name. There is no mercy and this being
a tentery juice as the hill stream game Rango three.
Speaker 2: Come in by me to die inside these walls, inside
the wild.
Speaker 3: Hadn't went no girls.
Speaker 4: I Hey everyone, and welcome back to Bloody Angola, a
podcast one hundred and forty two years in the making,
the complete story of America's bloodiest prison. I'm Jim Chapman,
and today I'm going to tell you the story of
a man convicted of killing an accountant in a Shreeport
City jail in nineteen fifty seven and another inmate inside
in Gola during the bloody years of the nineteen sixties.
His name was Douglas Dennis, and he went by the
name Swede inside of Bloody Angola. So Douglas Dennis was
born in Chicago, Illinois, in nineteen thirty five, but he
was not there long. As a matter of fact, within
six months of his birth, his family would move and
this would be a continual thing throughout the life of
Douglas Dennis. Early on in life, in childhood, he would
live in New York, he would live in Oklahoma, Bluxi, Mississippi, Baltimore,
and various other places. Now, Douglas Dennis was super smart.
As a matter of fact, people who knew him back
then would tell you his IQ likely tested close to
the genius level. So he graduates from school early. He
works these odd jobs, and then he decides he's going
to go into the Marine Corps. Does that, and for
some reason that even he could not explain, he decided
he's gonna go a wall that's absent without leave from
the Marine Corps, which they will hunt you down and
throw you in military prism when you go a wall,
especially during this time in history, so he couldn't be
exactly public after he went a wall. Now, at this point,
he's only eighteen years old. So he ends up leaving
the military base, steals a car to make his getaway,
and he goes to California. In California, he worked for
a logging company, and he kind of gets bored of that.
He's not someone who, let's say, enjoys manual labor. He
steals another car, but this time he gets caught, so
he gets sent.
Speaker 5: To a youth facility.
Speaker 4: Now, I know he's eighteen years old, and you're probably
thinking why did he get sent to a youth facility.
The answer is, I don't have an answer. Maybe at
this point in time in history, they didn't want to
put eighteen year olds in big boy prison, if you will,
So he does go to a youth facility. He ends
up getting parole at the age of nineteen, but there
was a catch to that, a caveat, if you will.
One of the stipulations was he had to remain with
his dad during his parole. I guess they figured his
dad would keep him on the straight and narrow path,
so that's what.
Speaker 5: He does now.
Speaker 4: His dad at the time was the general manager of
a news station in Florida, and it's important to mention
that at this point in Douglas Dennis's life, he and
his dad did not have a great relationship. I mean,
he is getting kind of wild at just eighteen years old.
It seems like he's making all the bad decisions. He's
already stolen to cars and he's barely nineteen years old,
and he's also going a wall from the military. But
his dad tried to help him out. He says, look,
I'm going to try to straighten you out, and he
gets him a job working for his dad's TV station,
and seemingly Douglas Dennis is getting on the right track.
He even enrolls in a real estate law school because
he has a big interest in the law. But all
that comes to an end when the family had to
move yet again for his dad's work. His dad was
essentially a reporter, and you live all over the country,
you go around chase him where the jobs are. This
was obviously something in his childhood he dealt with a lot,
and even at nineteen, his dad goes up to him
one day and he says, I'm out of here. I
got a job in another state. The problem was his
paroles stated that he had to live in the state
of Florida with his dad, so it was going to
be a bunch of red tape to get to be
able to move with his dad to another state. This
kind of blewed Douglas Dennis's mind and he decides, I'm
just not going and I'm not gonna tell anybody where
I'm at.
Speaker 5: Screw it.
Speaker 4: So the family leaves and at this point Douglas decides
he's gonna start hitchhiking throughout the country. And this time
in history that was you know, early sixties, hitchhiking much
more common thing, and so he does that with a
bunch of guys. But they're not exactly what you would
call a good group of guys to just hang out with.
They're mostly ex cons, and this group of guys they
pretty much pull off petty crimes as they go about traveling.
None of them had any money, so they're stealing things
and pawning them, whatever they've got to do to make
it through to the next day. And as they go
about their travels, Douglas hears about a place known as
Morgan City, Louisiana, and he hears there's a bunch of
high paying jobs for laborers.
Speaker 5: It doesn't matter if you have a record.
Speaker 4: You just go out there and they're gonna give you
work and they're gonna pay you a ship pile of money.
And for those of you unfamiliar with Lake Charles, it's
a city on the Gulf of Mexico, and even today,
but especially during that time, it was the place to
be if you were in the shrimping industry, or if
you wanted to work in the oil fields, or if
you were someone that you just liked tord work, or
maybe you didn't have that much of an education. But
you wanted to make enough money to support a family comfortably,
that's what you did. So that's where Douglas Dennis went.
But as I told you earlier, Douglas Dentnis ain't much
for manual labor and.
Speaker 5: He hated it right off the bat. Just not his
type of work.
Speaker 4: And it wasn't easy money by any means, which is
what he that's kind of work he liked. So he
ends up taking a job with a cab company. Hey,
I can drive a cab. I don't have to break
a sweat. This is perfect.
Speaker 5: It's in the area.
Speaker 4: In one particular night, the guy could not pay Douglas
Dnnis for driving that cab. The cab company owner, so
he gives Douglas Dennis a twenty five caliber pistol rather
than pay him, basically in lieu of cash. Not long
after this, Douglas Dennis hears through the streets that the
police were looking for him because they heard he had
that gun. But Dennis assumed it was because he violated
his parole. He didn't know that's actually why they were
looking for him, and he kind of panics, and he
and a couple of friends they decide we need to
get the hell out of town. The police are on
to me. They're going to violate me for my parole,
and I'm going to go to Big Boy prison. But
before he leaves, according to Douglas Dennis, this was his account,
a couple of guys owed him some money and he
needed to collect that money obviously because he was leaving town.
So Douglas and his crew of guys they go over
there and they pay a visit to these two guys,
and the guys tell Dennis and his crew they don't
have any money. So Douglas Dennis, he pulls out that
twenty five caliber pistol and one of the guys, he
just pistol whips the shit out of him. The other
folks with him, they beat up the other guy, and
then they're like, what do we do? What do we
do with these two guys because the second we leave,
they're gonna call the cops. So they say, all right,
here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna get in the car
with us. We're gonna drive to basically the county line
or parish line as it is here in Louisiana, and
we're gonna let you out and that way, if you
call the police, we're gonna be out of the jurisdiction.
And hopefully they want to be chasing us. Who So
that's what they do. They drive to the edge of town,
they let these guys out, Douglas Dennis makes a few
threats to him, and then they drive away. Now at
this point in Douglas Dennis's life, he's twenty one years old. Well,
those guys reported Douglas Dennis and his crew, and in
nineteen fifty seven he gets caught and he's charged with
a slew of charges, the most serious being armed robbery
and kidnapping of those guys. And the arm robbery charge
came in because before he threw them in the car
to drive them to the parish line, they had like
twenty bucks on him. He took that twenty bucks. Now,
later on in life he would say they owed him
that money, but you know, take that with a grain
of salt. But here's where it gets really bad for
Douglas Dennis because he would run a scam of sorts
in the Shreveport jail where he was housed, and he
would actually bully inmates coming into the jail for drunken
disorderly charges. They would get thrown in the drunk tank.
And in those days, you could keep your money on
you when you were booked into jail. They didn't take
it from you and put it in a little ziplock
bag or something, and you signed for it saying you
gave them five bucks. You just kept it on you. Now,
Douglas Dennis would take advantage of that. And I haven't
mentioned this yet, but y'all, Douglas Dennis was a big guy,
six y three and weighed.
Speaker 5: Over two hundred pounds.
Speaker 4: So these drunk guys, they would get booked and they
would get thrown into that drunk tank and Dennis, who
would be in the same cell. And it's important to
say this is known as a bullpen. It's basically a
holding cell where a lot of prisoners are they're waiting
to get booked into actual jail or they're waiting to
see a judge. And that's where Dennis sat for weeks.
And these drunk people would come in there and he
would just beat the shit out of them and take
their money, and if they had cigarettes, he'd take their cigarettes.
Whatever he could get off of them. Well, on February
thirteenth of nineteen fifty seven. He actually pulled this off
with four different guys in the same day, just beat
the shit out these guys took their money, took their cigarettes, whatever.
But the fifth guy that he encountered, he was an
accountant of all things, and he fought back, which not
a good idea because Douglas Dennis beat this inmate to
death in a holding cell in the Shreport City jail,
killed him. So he goes into the jail, into the
Shreport City jail four charges of kidnapping and robbery, and
now he gets transported to a parish jail with murder.
Speaker 5: Charges added to that list. So instead of looking.
Speaker 4: At maybe a year in jail, now he's looking at it,
as you can imagine, a lot more time.
Speaker 5: It's not looking good for the Swede.
Speaker 4: So in short order, as a matter of fact, in
the same year nineteen fifty seven, Douglas Dennis pleads guilty
to all of this, the kidnapping, the robbery in Morgan
City and also the murder in that Shreport City jail.
Now he pleaded guilty because he got a deal where
they said we'll take the death penalty off the table,
and he went for it, and he ended up getting
a life sentence inside of Bloody in Gola. And look
this is when in Gola was that it's most dangerous,
the totally bloody years, even for a man as aggressive
as the Swede. And he will recall that upon arriving
at Bloody in Gola, he would make his way single file,
led by the guards to what was at that time
an all white cell blocks. You're walking single file down
a tier when out of the shadows, an inmate appears
with a pipe and he beats the shit out of
another inmate with it and then disappeared just as fast.
Speaker 5: Dennis would describe it.
Speaker 4: Now, that was his first day in Louisiana State Benitentiary
at Angola, and he would try to assimilate to life
inside the country's largest maximum security present, which that wasn't
easy because he had no outside support. His family at
this time had given up on him, so there was
no way for him to get money for the canteen
outside of what he could earn working in the fields,
which was about six cents a day back in those days.
So he would start rolling cigarettes and he would make
these cigarettes into packs and he would sell these packs
pretty frequently, which would help him get soap and other
items from the canteen. That was the way he made
his money. However, it was not long before the Swede
would become the target himself. Two inmates had stolen the
contents out of Douglas dennis locker. They had these lockers
that were underneath their bunk beds. Somebody broke that lock
and they stole everything out of his locker. And he
was at dinner with another inmate when another inmate tips
him off and he says, look, not only did they
steal all your shit out of your locker, but they
also intend to kill you when you get back from dinner.
So Dennis blines it to what's known as the leather
Shop inside of Louisiana State Penitentiary and he's given what's
known as a leather knife, and this is just a
stiff piece of leather that's very sharp on the edges,
and he heads back to his dormitory. So as soon
as he gets in to that dormitory, a fight ensues
between Douglas Dennis, an inmate named Wesley Sonier, and another
inmate named Earl Duprey who went by the name Blackjack
and as the Swede tells it. Wesley pulls out a
cane knife, and so Douglas pulls out that leather knife.
Then he grabs a pillow, and he takes that pillow.
Speaker 5: And he wraps it around his arm.
Speaker 4: So he is focusing on these two inmates, Blackjack and Wesley,
and then out of nowhere, a third inmate appears and
cracks the Swede right in the eye with a lock
in a sock. Literally took a padlock, put it in
a sock and cracked him with it. Now, it seemingly
the same time, Wesley slices his arm several times with
that cane knife, sliced it so good, in fact, that
it sliced through the swedes tendons.
Speaker 5: So he's bleeding.
Speaker 4: Profusely, and he staggers a little while, and then he
collapses onto the ground. Now he ends up getting picked
up by the guards and he's brought to the infirmary
where the doctor in the infirmary was able to reattach
the tendons in his arm, and that would give him
eventually the use of his arm again. However, his right
eye was put out forever by that strike with.
Speaker 5: The lock and the sock.
Speaker 4: So after weeks in the hospital, Douglas Dennis gets sent
to Angola's lock down straight from the hospital, of course,
because hey, you're involved in a fight, doesn't matter if
you were defending yourself, you're going to lock down. And
that's where he went. Sat there for a good while,
and then from there he would work in the warehouse
where items stored for the canteen were kept. And this
is where he would come across, according to him, one
of the worst inmates in Angola at that time.
Speaker 5: As it related to reputation.
Speaker 4: And that was a guy named Robert Lee George whose
nickname was Tangle. I can't make that shit up now.
Tangle I was kind of like the warehouse manager. And
according to Douglas Dennis, nobody liked tim. He would boss
people around. He was a big guy, he was very intimidating,
and he was, you know, according to Douglas Dennis, just
an asshole. So he had already stabbed Tangalia a barber
at Angola. And look, these barbers, they're like the most
popular people in prison.
Speaker 5: In most cases.
Speaker 4: I mean, they keep your your hair high and tight
and all those sort of things. They know everybody's business
because it's just like in the free world. You go
into barbershop in the free world, and it's a gossip
session for as long as you're getting your haircut. No
different inside of Bloody and Gola. And this guy was
well liked and Tangali stabbed him, tried to kill him,
and so he was feared and hated by most of
the inmate population, according to Douglas Dennis. Now, Douglas Dennis
said Tangli would try to bully him a lot.
Speaker 5: There was a lot of friction with them.
Speaker 4: And one night, Tangle II goes into the warehouse and
he gets pessed at Douglas Dennis for something, and he
just starts ripping into him over some bullshit and he
screams at Dennis and he tells him, if you don't
watch it, I'm gonna put your other eye out.
Speaker 5: Now, that's a.
Speaker 4: Threat inside a prison that everybody heard. And let me
tell you how this works inside a prison. If you
let somebody do that to you and basically punk you
out in front of everybody and you don't say anything,
you're gonna be in a real big bind, real quick.
Douglas Dennis knows how this game is played, and so
he had to respond to that, otherwise everybody was going
to start trying to bitch him out. Basically, so he
leaves and he goes to the yard and one of
his buddies in the yard was a guy that was
known to get you things, and he says, I need
a knife, and that ain't gets him a knife. As
a matter of fact, he had one on him, according
to Douglas Dennis. So he gets it. He walks back
into the warehouse and right then and there he stabs
Tangali many multiples of times, killing him on the spot.
So what's worse than life inside of bloody Angola? How
about death inside of bloody Angola? As he headed to
death row. This was in the spring of nineteen sixty five. However,
he appeals that death sentence, and he appealed it on
the grounds of self defense.
Speaker 5: He said he was defending himself.
Speaker 4: Tangli tried to attack him when he had that knife,
and that's when he went to stab in him. And
his lawyers they demand a retrial based off this evidence,
and basically the state comes back and I'm not sure
what they saw, but they essentially said, look, we'll offer
you a plea deal and we'll take you off of
death row and we'll give you another life sentence. So
Douglas Dennis, He's like, I'm down with that. He takes it,
and he actually gets off of death row. This was
in nineteen sixty eight, so by the early seventies, surprisingly
Dennis has completely changed his behavior. Inside of Bloody and Gola.
He earns trustee status and he actually becomes a very
well respected member of the inmate population.
Speaker 5: Inside of Angola.
Speaker 4: He also becomes the inmate that the attorney for Louisiana Prisons,
the first attorney, guy by the name of Richard Crane.
Richard Crane would lean on Douglas Dennis a lot when
revamping the penitentiary's approach to law and to the inmate's
access to law. And the reason he did this was
he knew how intellectually smart that the Swede was. Don't
forget this guy. A lot of people said he was
pretty close to a genius, and he graduated high school early.
He may have acted like an idiot, but he wasn't
an idiot. Eventually, Douglas Dennis would change his behavior so
much that he would spend as much time outside of
the wire of Angola as he would spend inside of it.
He will work at the Capitol, he will work at
the Police Bears, he will work at the DOC the
Department of Correction offices in Baton Rouge. And he even
attended night classes at LSU taking criminal justice. And while
he was taking those classes, believe it or not, he
had a three zero point nine six GPA, not too shabby.
But no matter how much good the Douglas Dennis could
do for himself, trouble just seemed to always follow this guy. So,
while driving outside of the prison in Baton Rouge, he
gets involved in an auto accident. This is in nineteen
seventy nine, and this accident was not his fault. Someone
hit him, but the person that hit him died in
that accident, and that created a political shit storm and
everyone started losing trust in the suite. He was damaged
goods then, because, as you would think, people were coming
from everywhere saying, why was this freaking guy driving outside
of the prison. He sents for the rest of his
life out of Louisiana State Penitentiary and he gets in
a rack and kills someone outside.
Speaker 5: Of the gates, and even though it wasn't his.
Speaker 4: Fault, is a political shit storm oc Brown, as a
matter of fact, who would become the District.
Speaker 5: Attorney of Baton Ruage.
Speaker 4: He didn't like it one bit. He was very vocal
about it during that time. So all of this pressure
on Douglas Dennis later that year in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 5: Would lead to a dramatic escape.
Speaker 4: So Douglas Dennis, through some criminal friends on the outside,
would be supplied a car and a getaway driver, and
late one day in nineteen seventy nine, this getaway driver
picked him up at the Department of Corrections headquarters and
Douglas Dennis escapes and he's on the run for ten years.
At this point, he had been inside out of Angola
for twenty two years. So he ends up escaping. He
spends a week in New Orleans at a hotel. He
gets two hundred bucks from his criminal friends. He uses
that to buy a used car and he manages to
cross the border in mcgallan, Texas into Mexico and for
the next ten years until nineteen eighty eight, he works
in Mexico El Salvador and spent the majority of his
time in Guatemala. He picked up Spanish along the way.
He worked in the accounting industry in South America. He
even meets a woman and they fall in love. I
don't know if they got married or not, but they
certainly fell in love, and he kind of stays out
of trouble. Now this woman is also from the United States,
and all our family still led in the United States.
And eventually Douglas Dennis he gets a it's a fake passport,
meaning he used his fake name to gain the passport,
but the passport itself is real, and she wants to
go back and see her family, and he says.
Speaker 5: I'll come with you.
Speaker 4: He's got this actually real passport, it's just a fake
name on it. And so they go to the airport
and it's getting close for their flight and he looks
around and he's lost his passport, can't find it anywhere.
So he's like shit. At this point, he's got a choice.
He's gonna have to stay in Mexico and just say
screw it, go by yourself, or he had another choice,
which was what he decided to do, and he said, well,
just go another day. He makes a fake passport that
looks very similar to the real one that he had.
They go back, they hand it to the Mexican authorities,
and right away they start delaying. These Mexican authorities, they're
just not so sure about this passport. So long story short,
he notices that they know something's wrong. They don't know
who he is, but they know something's wrong with this passport,
and they're taking a long time to approve him. So
he's he bolts. He's basically like, I gotta go to
the bathroom, and he leaves, and he knows, I've got
to come up with another plan to get back in
the States because now the Mexican police are on to me.
So he's really desperate to get back across the border
because they're going to come arrest him. And he does
do that within short order, manages to get across the border,
and he goes to several different states and eventually a
few months later he he's finally captured. Now, the way
that he got captured was remember that passport that he
had that was a real passport with a fake name.
Somebody found that and turned it in. They put two
and two together, the US Fugitive Office and the Mexican
authorities figured out this is the guy that escaped for
me in Gola. Of course, they had a picture of
him on the passport. Somehow they were able to put
all that together. He ends up getting captured in Houston,
Texas after being on the lamb from Bloody Angola for
ten years. Now, upon his capture, the Swede would end
up right back where he started in Angola, and he
gets more time tacked onto a sentence. But the dude's
serving two life sentences. I mean, he had nothing to
lose by escaping. He might have got an extra forty
years or something like that. It means nothing, But it's
just shocking to me, kind of amazing that he was
able to stay away for ten years. He was able
to go on the land for ten years, and had
he not crossed the border back into the United States,
he'd probably still be somewhere in Mexico.
Speaker 5: Right, So he ends up back in Angola.
Speaker 4: Eventually he becomes a reporter for the Angolite and towards
the end of his life with serious health issues, Dennis
would eventually seek pardon, but due to this escape and
killing someone inside a prison in addition to killing someone
inside of another jail, he gets denied that pardon and
he dies inside a Bloody Angoa. This is in two
thousand and nine at the age of seventy three years old.
And there you have it, the story of the Swede.
And I was surprised. As many episodes of Angola as
I've done, I've never come across the Swede, but to
be ten years as I said on the run, pretty
amazing stuff. Not saying I recommend it, but pretty amazing nonetheless.
And look, next week is Thanksgiving, so I want to
say Happy Thanksgiving.
Speaker 5: I'm likely going to.
Speaker 4: Release something, not sure what I'm going to release yet,
but I want to.
Speaker 5: I'm very thankful. Y'all want to know what I'm thankful for.
Speaker 4: I am thankful for all of your support, and I
really mean that. I love doing Bloody and Golah just
probably my favorite podcast relative to what I like talking about.
And it's only because of all of you that I'm
able to do it. Check out the Patreon Patreon dot
com slash Bloody Andngola Podcast if you'd like to support
the show. And until next time for Bloody and Gola Podcast,
one hundred and forty two years in the making, The
complete story of America's Bloody is present.
Speaker 1: Peace a Wall Street Line, Shackle, change, Oh, Who's some Girdie,
it's calling my name. There is no mercy, and this
being a tentery juice as the hill stream game Wrangle three, I'm.
Speaker 2: In bed by me to die.
Speaker 3: Inside these walls, inside the wise, and when the walks,
I know it's
Speaker 2: Albody angled, obody angle,