The Swede | Bloody Angola Podcast

0:05 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. Come in by me to die inside these walls, inside the wild.

0:56 Hadn't went no girls. 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.

1:59 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

3:31 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. To a youth facility. 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.

4:13 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. He does now. 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.

5:13 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.

6:05 Screw it. 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.

6:57 It doesn't matter if you have a record. 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.

7:38 He hated it right off the bat. Just not his type of work. 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. It's in the area. 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.

9:00 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.

9:50 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.

11:06 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. Over two hundred pounds. 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.

12:01 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.

13:04 Charges added to that list. So instead of looking. At maybe a year in jail, now he's looking at it, as you can imagine, a lot more time. It's not looking good for the Swede. 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.

14:32 Dennis would describe it. 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.

16:02 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.

16:49 Then he grabs a pillow, and he takes that pillow. And he wraps it around his arm. 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. So he's bleeding. 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.

18:02 The lock and the sock. 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. As it related to reputation.

18:42 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. In most cases.

19:22 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. There was a lot of friction with them.

20:03 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. Now, that's a. 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.

21:25 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. He said he was defending himself. 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.

22:35 He earns trustee status and he actually becomes a very well respected member of the inmate population. Inside of Angola. 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.

23:22 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.

24:06 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.

25:04 Of the gates, and even though it wasn't his. Fault, is a political shit storm oc Brown, as a matter of fact, who would become the District. Attorney of Baton Ruage. 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. Would lead to a dramatic escape. 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.

25:57 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.

26:39 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. I'll come with you.

27:19 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.

28:40 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,

30:11 he'd probably still be somewhere in Mexico. Right, So he ends up back in Angola. 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.

30:56 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. I'm likely going to. Release something, not sure what I'm going to release yet, but I want to. I'm very thankful. Y'all want to know what I'm thankful for. 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.

31:43 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. 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.

32:47 In bed by me to die. Inside these walls, inside the wise, and when the walks, I know it's Albody angled, obody angle,