A man who would become one of the USA’s most notorious and feared prisoners is sitting in his
cell in Arizona State Prison, aka Florence. He gets up from the bed and paces from one
side of the cell to the other, looking at the photo of his sister on the wall, intermittently
pierced with feelings of self-hate when seeing his meager worldly belongings. He’s caged,
he’s bored, he’s lost and he’s damn well raging. All he wants is a TV to pass the hours.
He’ll get what he wants, but as an indirect consequence, he will brutally kill someone.
He’ll commit that crime without a shred of remorse for the victim.
Even the most experienced guards will be taken aback by the utter savagery of the slaying.
And it won’t be the first Robert Wayne Vickers will kill in prison.
He didn't know it at the time, but his name will go down in corrections history.
During his childhood, Vickers was never labeled a maniac, a young man with an irrepressible urge
to hurt people. Far from it. It was prison and juvenile facilities that made him what he became.
You could say those places served as a kind of cocoon where a diabolical human being was created.
That person entered the big boy’s prison aged just 19, and he would never experience freedom again.
Standing tall but slight of frame, Vickers was never known as a fearsome young man
during his stints in Arizona juvenile institutions. He was, however, unhinged,
and he had the history to prove it. His first arrest came in the 6th grade, and he would be
in trouble with the law consistently after that. We can’t tell you much about his upbringing, but
we know when he was just a teenager, he stabbed two boys with pencils at a juvenile facility
in Arizona called Catalina Mountain School. Ok, so you’re thinking, well, he sounds fearsome
enough to me. But you should know that he wasn’t always acting up and attacking people. He could
be calm, he could be nice, and then BANG, he’d explode, sometimes with such ferocity that his
actions seemed unfathomable to those around him. To understand this, you need to know that Vickers
suffered from something called temporal lobe epilepsy. This was contested later in his life,
but there seemed little doubt Vickers was mentally disabled, not only because of the wild things he
did but because medical professionals backed it up. Loving care and parental
guidance he had none of, quite the opposite. That alone is so often a road to delinquency.
When he was a child he was treated by a psychologist, a person who noted Vickers
had suffered cerebral trauma which led to him having seizures. If you’re not aware of how the
brain works, many people that have suffered brain damage have later exhibited violent behavior.
During one of Vickers’ court appearances a medical professional testified that this damage to the
brain led to Vickers occasionally experiencing a dissociative state, meaning at times he
didn’t really know what he was doing. His frontal cortex, the part of the brain sometimes called the
“executive suite” that’s responsible for impulse control and managing emotions,
went on the blink now and then. As one medical professional once said, Vickers at times was
just “incapable of rendering any judgement and . . . unable to know right from wrong.”
This won’t surprise you after you’ve seen what this kid did later in his life.
He ended up in Arizona State Prison when he was just 19-years old. He wasn’t there for any kind
of violent act, but for committing a series of house burglaries in Tempe, Arizona. He wasn’t
just an ordinary thief, though, he was what you could call prolific. In just 13 days in Tempe,
he burgled 12 houses, which was quite the workload. At various points in time,
he’d also burgled 33 houses in California. Because of his background of staying in juvey facilities
and because of the number of burglaries, he was sentenced to three to nine years.
With good behavior on his side, he could have been out in his early twenties and may have been
able to start a new life, but Vickers would never again know what it was like to have his shoulders
massaged by a woman, to watch the sun setting over the Pacific, to eat what he wanted to eat.
His home for the rest of his life would be a series of spartan prison cells,
ending with a short trip to the Death House. When he arrived at the prison in 1977,
the place was renowned for gang violence. In fact, that year a federal judge ruled that the
prison was incredibly overcrowded, and he ordered the state to either lower
the prison population or build another prison. It was a tough place for a teenager, a skinny one
at that, who at any moment could have a seizure or lose his ability to control his emotions. A
corrections officer who spent 25 years working for the Arizona Department of Corrections said he
was there when Vickers entered the prison for the first time. He said the kid didn’t look imposing
at all. He looked vulnerable if anything, being so young and fragile-looking compared to the hardened
criminals with whom he shared his new residence. The officer said this was why Vickers almost
straight away tried to make a name for himself. He had to look the part otherwise
he’d be bullied by the older guys, such is the atavistic mentality that blights almost
every prison in America. Vickers stabbed a man named Homer Burns with a shank in 1978,
although the officer believed that Vickers had done this only to impress the white prison gang,
the “Aryan Brotherhood”. The victim was an African American man, so it’s likely Vickers was what’s
called in prison slang, “putting in work.” For that assault with a deadly weapon,
Vickers’ relatively short sentence turned into a much longer one. He was sentenced to another
ten to fifteen years. Now his feet were attached to the top of a very slippery slope, one that the
inmate was intent to see to the bottom of. In October of the same year, Vickers earned
his reputation for being an unhinged sort of guy. The lean teen was about
to take things to the next level. For a while, he’d been complaining
that he didn’t have a TV in his cell, but then he got the opportunity to share a cell
with a guy that did have a TV. That guy was named Frank Ponciano. The two got along at
first and Vickers was happy enough that he got to watch television, but then something went wrong.
Vickers woke up in the cell one day, and Ponciano was nowhere to be seen. He soon
realized that his cellmate had gone for lunch and not even woken him up. If that wasn’t bad enough,
he then realized that Ponciano had committed the unspeakable prison crime of drinking his Kool-Aid.
Furious, Vickers took the sheet off the bed and started twisting it, his knuckles reddening at
the exertion and his face contorted into an ugly grimace. When Ponciano waltzed into the cell,
satiated from his hit of prison food, Vickers wrapped the twisted sheet around Ponciano’s
neck and strangled him to death. For good measure, he took out a sharpened toothbrush
and stabbed his already-dead celly six times. Vickers then used the same tool to carve the word
“Bonzai” into Ponciano’s back. What he’d meant to carve was the Japanese war cry, “Banzai”,
which you could blame on a lack of education or the fact that the circumstances were a bit hectic.
If you’re wondering, the cute little trees are called “Bonsai.”
There was a dead man in Vickers’ cell, yet when staff did the next count no one realized they were
one man short. In fact, it was Vickers himself that told a corrections officer his cellmate was
dead. The officer didn’t know whether to believe it, so Vickers burned Ponciano’s
foot with a cigarette. There was of course no movement or scream from the deceased.
Vickers’ next words to the officer were, “Get this stinking BEEP out of my cell.”
From then on, Vickers became known as “Bonzai Bob”. Later a psychologist named Kent Spillman
asked Vickers if he regretted anything about his actions,
to which Vickers replied he wished he’d have carved a swastika into his victim’s back. He also
expressed regret that he hadn’t dotted the “I”. Vickers was convicted of first-degree murder
and sentenced to death, but then in 1981, a U.S. District Judge named Carl Muecke granted Vickers
a stay of execution. The inmate was far from happy about this. He actually wanted to die,
so being granted a stay was a huge disappointment. When the media managed to talk to Vickers he told
reporters that he hoped someone would kill the judge’s mom, adding that the next time
he killed a fellow prisoner he’d write the judge’s name in the victim’s back.
That’s not exactly what he did, but he did commit another extraordinarily
horrible crime. The judge no doubt later regretted not granting Vickers a quick death.
Prior to his second murder, Vickers got himself in trouble numerous times, so much so he became the
bane of the prison staff. He attacked officers at least 11 times and was found with shanks and even
homemade bombs in his cell on over 40 occasions. The word on the street, or should we say landing,
was that Vickers could make weapons out of anything. When he wasn’t attacking staff, he was
beating up other inmates, perhaps hoping someone would give him the execution he so dearly wanted.
Another thing that got him on the bad side of the prison authorities was when he and another
inmate managed to enter a ventilation system and they both ended up on the roof. Prior to that,
Vickers short-circuited his cell door and left a dummy on his bed. It was hardly the greatest
prison escape and the two were soon back in their respective cells. On a few occasions, Vickers
slipped out of his handcuffs or even opened them with a key he’d fashioned out of plastic.
Suffice to say, he was becoming a bit of a problem, but he wasn’t close to being done.
Let’s remember he’d been granted a stay of execution,
but that is only a delay in the sentence being carried out. It’s not an absolute reprieve.
In 1981, Vickers wrote to governor Bruce Babbitt. In that letter, he said, “I told my lawyer and
attorney General to pull my appeals and gas me. I know it don't take too long to do that,
so what’s the hold-up fella? If ya don't do it soon, I’m gonna draw more blood than
your cheap mop's can absorb.” That was not an empty threat.
On March 4, 1982, Vickers and other prisoners were working as porters cleaning one of the pods.
Vickers might have been in one of his better moods that day and so he showed a photograph of
his beloved young niece to a fellow inmate named Buster Holsinger. He also proudly showed the man
a picture his niece had sketched, but rather than say how cute his niece was or compliment her on
her artistic skills, Holsinger asked Vickers if he’d ever performed various sex acts on the girl.
Vickers was incensed, and with that faulty biological machinery in his
brain not doing its job, he quietly exploded. Back in his cell, the inventive Vickers got to
work on a kind of Molotov Cocktail. This time he filled an empty ice cream tub with five bottles
of flammable Vitalis hair oil. For the fuse of the device, he used ordinary tissue paper.
He then marched over to Holsinger’s cell, lit the fuse, and threw the bomb at him. Holsinger
was a portly man to say the least and he couldn’t get out of the way. The flames weren’t enough to
totally engulf Holsinger, but Vickers had more oil to throw on the already-burning man. Flames and
smoke filled the cell, and it was the smoke in the end that killed Holsinger. Two other men were also
taken to the prison hospital after inhaling smoke. After that Vickers told investigators,
“I told them they should have gassed me in December when they had a chance.”
He still wasn’t done. He stayed on Death Row for the murder
of Holsinger, but his defense was still arguing that Vickers had a history of mental illness
stemming from brain trauma he’d suffered as a child. They argued that Vickers’ outbursts
were uncontrollable and in a prison setting where violence is pervasive,
it’s virtually impossible for him not to have one of his episodes. They put forth the case
that Vickers was a victim of the prison system. Inside the prison, inmates now kept their distance
from Vickers. His only friend on Death Row was another murderer, named Robert Comer. Comer would
one day testify about his close bond with Vickers, “He was not just a friend, he was my brother. We
spilled blood together. I would give my life for him, as he would for me. We shared loyalty, honor,
tribe, brotherhood, friendship and kinship.” In fact, they’d been so close and caused so
much trouble that the authorities put them in a specially designed segregated pod where they could
not interact with any other prisoners. This would later become the place where the most mentally
ill and incredibly violent inmates were housed. In 1986, Vickers stabbed a prison officer with
a spear-like device he’d made from part of a typewriter. The officer didn’t even get that
close to Vickers. He’d only put some breakfast through the prisoner’s door slot and that gave the
waiting Vickers enough time to commit the deed. The handle of the knife that Vickers had made
from pasted rolled-up newspapers was long enough so Vickers could stab the officer in the body.
That was enough. Never again would Vickers have the chance to hurt anyone. From then on he was
holed up in a special cage designed for him only. It was more like the cage of an animal,
welded inside a prison cell. It was a cage within a cage. Vickers could only ever get
inside it when he was naked and even then, his body was rigorously checked for contraband.
Only then was he given clothes to put on. If he had to go someplace, he was first cuffed and
then taken to that place. On his return, the same process of stripping and searching was repeated.
Now he wanted to die more than ever, and so he commenced with
his writing campaign to the governor. One time he asked if his heart could be
donated to a Fort Huachuca boy who was in need of a transplant, after his execution of course.
The boy died a long time before Vickers did. In another letter, he asked the governor if he
could die wearing a 3-piece suit. “I wanna die dressed,” he wrote. “Gonna be some ladies there.
I don't want to go nude or in state clothes.” That didn’t happen, either, nor was his request
granted that his last meal be cooked by a woman. He did at least get the last meal he asked for:
Green chili burros - burritos with barbecued steak, French fries with ketchup, vanilla
ice cream, cream soda, and a solitary cigarette. He had to wait until May 5, 1999, to finally die.
Then, aged 41, his sister, niece, aunt, and cousin watched as he lay on the executioner’s gurney.
Vickers almost looked overjoyed. Smiling, he looked in the direction of the one-way mirror
and said, “Hello, everybody. See you later.” After that, he seemed to mouth the words, “time to go”.
The drugs flowed into his system at 3:03 p.m and a few minutes later he was pronounced dead.
Now you need to watch, “Most Evil Prisoner Kept in Glass Box.” Or for a prison story
that boggles the mind, watch, “Man So Violent Even Other Prisoners Fear Him.”