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During the attack, many of the terrified hostages, blindfolded and resigned to death blows from their executioners, were blissfully surprised. Phillip ("Curly") Watkins had been talking to his captor. "I asked him if he knew a buddy of mine. He said he did, and then I said, 'Well, then you know who I am.' " When the helicopters moved in, Watkins' man shoved him to the ground and fell on top of him. "The guy had time to kill me, but he didn't," said Watkins.
In his Manhattan apartment, Rockefeller heard the news by telephone from his counsel, Robert Douglass, who was on the scene. "I'll never forget the moment when the report was given that 14 guards had come out alive," he told TIME'S Roger Williams. "Now it's 15, now it's 16, now it's 18. And it went up to 21. I was just absolutely overwhelmed. I didn't see how it was possible, with 1,200 men in there armed, with electrified barricades, with trenches.
Twenty-eight men were saved — far more than anyone could have predicted. It was a race between the gas, the knife and police."
When the compound was secured an hour later, nine hostages lay dead. Also dead or fatally wounded were 26 prisoners (four convicts were later found dead of stab wounds, apparently inflicted by other inmates in factional fighting). Then, in the confusion of the aftermath, Oswald and Dunbar made a perhaps understandable but nonetheless inexcusable mistake. They announced that the hostages had all died by having their throats slit. Dunbar added that two hostages had been killed before the attack, and that one hostage had been found emasculated, his testicles stuffed in his mouth.
No Slashed Throats
Individual troopers corroborated the officials' stories. Then, 24 hours later, the Monroe County medical examiner, Dr. John F. Edland, provided some shocking news. He had examined eight of the dead hostages and found that "all eight cases died of gunshot wounds. There was no evidence of slashed throats." A ninth hostage's body was examined at a nearby hospital; he, too, had died of bullet wounds. Two independent pathologists confirmed that all nine hostages had indeed been shot to death. None of the bodies had been mutilated, although some bore cuts and marks from beatings. All had died on Monday morning.
Why had officials been so quick to offer as facts the unsubstantiated reports of slashed throats? Admittedly, the immediate scene was hectic; the wounded and the dead hostages were rushed out of the prison to morgues or hospitals with great speed. Said one observer: "A doctor would take a look at each one. If he shook his head, that meant the guy was dead, and they pulled the sheet over his head." In many cases, the bleeding was so profuse that it spattered blood on the wounded men's necks.
Convicts had repeatedly threatened to cut throats, and the executioners' poised knives at the time of the attack had created the expectation that they would do